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The Young Comrade / The New Gallery


 

A photo of a silhouette of a man with glasses holding and reading a book. The background is red.

 The Young Comrade, Alvin Luong, May 21st - June 26th 2021

 
 
 The Young Comrade is a pseudo-documentary that deliriously interprets a fictional play written by Bertolt Brecht in 1930 about the founding of a speculative communist state in China, as a true historical account of its revolution in the 20th century. The video documents an attempt to search for traces of the characters portrayed in Brecht’s play in contemporary Beijing, and is punctuated by the artist’s performance of four altered acts from the play. The Young Comrade is an unstable blending of reality, fiction, and history that provokes multi-layered notions of essentialism, orientalism, Western colonialism, and diasporic experiences of alienation between the West and the ethnic homeland.
 

A photo of the gallery exhibition. The film "The Young Comrade" is projected on the left wall. A painting of a forest is hung on the back wall. A printed photograph of a building facade juts out from the right wall as a 3D wall installation.
A photo of the gallery exhibition. The film "The Young Comrade" is projected on the left wall. A painting of a forest is hung on the back wall.
A photo of the gallery exhibition. A painting of a forest is hung on the back wall. A printed photograph of a building facade juts out from the right wall as a 3D wall installation.
A photo of the movie "The Young Comrade" is projected onto a white wall. The still shot in the movie show a man standing in front of a painting of a forest with a mask covering his face. The subtitle reads: "I believe in the cause of freedom."

A photo of the projected movie "The Young Comrade" on a white wall in the gallery. The still shot in the movie is a silhouette of a man with glasses on a red background. The man is holding and reading a book. The subtitle reads: "All you see is the city, and not the farmers of the plains."

A printed photograph of a building facade juts out from the right wall as a 3D wall installation in the gallery.

A photograph of the Vinyl title on the gallery wall that reads: "The Young Comrade, Alvin Luong".


Brecht’s play, titled The Measures Taken, follows the Agitators, a group of European communists who have come to China to further its native communist movement during the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War. The intention of the play was to encourage audiences to resist reactive, ruptural tactics of revolution, and instead work holistically through the distribution of propaganda to educate the masses on communism. The play was sympathetic to an internationalist communist movement, and featured the problematic use of yellow-face as an attempt to demonstrate how the movement’s political aims could transcend ethnic and nationalist essentialism. The enmeshing of Brecht’s play into the history of China creates a narrative in The Young Comrade about foreigners who become homogeneous to the ethnic ideal of a country, except in beliefs, practices, and ideas.
A photo of a painting of a forest mounted on a wall in the gallery.A photo of a painting of a forest mounted on a wall in the gallery.
A printed photograph of a building facade juts out from the right wall as a 3D wall installation in the gallery.A close up of printed photograph of a building facade juts out from the right wall as a 3D wall installation in the gallery.A photograph of the storefront of the gallery. The vinyl on the window reads: "The Young Comrade, Alvin Luong". Inside the front windows we see a large printed photograph of a facade of a building from the movie "The Young Comrade". This printed photograph takes up the whole window space.

The Young Comrade includes an installation of the theatrical backdrops that are featured in the video, as well as a newly written publication featuring a prologue and an epilogue to The Young Comrade called Two Pictures of Dying by Alvin Luong and Yang Tiange, and translated by Yijia Zhang. Funding support for this exhibition came from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

 
 
 
 

                                   
 Alvin Luong (梁超洪) creates artworks based on stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from the diasporic working class communities that he lives and works with. These stories are combined with biography to produce artworks that reflect upon issues of historical development, political economy, and social reproduction, and how these issues intimately affect the lives of people. In 2017, Luong was awarded the OCADU Off-Screen Award for Best New Media Installation at the Images Festival. In 2018, Luong was the Artist-In-Residence at Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing) and lectured at the Institute for Provocation (Beijing). In 2019, the artist exhibited at Boers-Li Gallery (Beijing), was invited to pursue research at HB Station Contemporary Art Research Center (Guangzhou), and screened at Gudskul (Jakarta). In 2020, the artist screened at China Millennium Monument Art Museum (Beijing), produced a video program with Guangdong Times Art Museum (Guangzhou). In 2021, the artist is an Artist-In-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto).
 Tiange Yang is a curator and writer based in Beijing. He is Curator at the 798CUBE Art Center (Beijing), and prior to that, was the Associate Curator at the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing) from 2017 to 2019. The exhibitions that Yang has curated include Contamination, Not for Perfection, but for Contamination (Hua International, Beijing, 2021), Buddhist Youths: United Collective Indifference (Goethe-Institut China, Beijing, 2019) and There are volcanoes under the sea (BLG Lab at the Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, 2019). Yang currently researches issues of the body and the construction of identity and the nationalist formations in twentieth-century China and the contemporary world.Yijia Zhang translates between English and Chinese languages, experiences and cultures. She has been a freelance translator for museums and galleries for over three years. With a BA in English and an MA in Communication, Yijia is now a Sociology PhD student at The University of British Columbia. The experience of moving from a small town in China to Shanghai and then to Vancouver offered her a unique lens. Inspired by her own migration experience, currently, Yijia explores the possibility of translating Chinese immigrants' experience into sociological inquiries and explanations while maintaining the complexity and nuance of the everyday.The New Gallery gratefully acknowledges its home on the traditional territories of the people of Treaty 7 region, including the Blackfoot Confederacy (Kainai, Piikani and Siksika, Métis Nation of Alberta Region III, Stoney Nakoda First Nation (Chiniki, Bearspaw, 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. The artist would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.