塑胶狮 Su Jiao Shi
Yong Fei Guan
July 20
111 Riverfront Ave SW during the Calgary Chinese Elderly Citizens’ Association’s annual Walkathon.
Saturday, August 17
Riverfront Ave and 2nd Ave SE in conjunction with the Calgary Chinatown Street Festival.
Exhibition Description /
On April 4, 2017, the City of Edmonton removed the Chinese guardian lions from Harbin Gate at Edmonton Chinatown for LRT construction. Coincidently, as of January 2018, China has stopped accepting plastic waste globally. In the context of these two events, artist Yong Fei Guan created 塑胶狮 Su Jiao Shi.
塑胶狮 Su Jiao Shi is a pair of contemporary Chinese guardian lions made from household plastic waste. Coming from a heritage that wastes nothing, Guan questions consumer culture and its effect on our shared global environment.
Guan suggests an ironic relationship between the Chinese guardian lions and plastic waste: the Chinese guardian lions are perceived as not valuable enough to stay in their original place, whereas our plastic waste is not valuable enough for China to take from us. 塑胶狮 translates to plastic lion.
塑胶狮 Su Jiao Shi is funded by Edmonton Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and first presented by The Works Art & Design Festival 2018 and Nuit Blanche Edmonton 2018: Gentrification Party.
Yong Fei Guan is a Chinese-Canadian artist with a degree in Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Guan explores multicultural identity, politics, and their relationship to environmental issues in her work. She has been involved in public art and community art projects, which include YEGmidautumn2017, YEGCANVAS 2015, and an ongoing picture book: C is for Compost. In her most recent work, 金猪 Golden Pig, Guan continues to explore the global issue of single-use plastics with her monstrous golden piggy bank. In 2019, Guan received the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Award from the Edmonton Arts Council.
Territorial Acknowledgments
TNG gratefully acknowledges its home on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region, including the Blackfoot Confederacy (Kainai, Piikani and Siksika), Métis Nation of Alberta Region III, Stoney Nakoda First Nation (Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley), and Tsuu T’ina First Nation. TNG would also like to acknowledge the many other First Nations, Métis and Inuit who have crossed this land for generations.