Through lens-based processes, I create multimedia narratives that utilizes print-media as well as digital media, put into a contextual space that encapsulates the existential anxieties within my homo/queer, diasporic, 2nd-generation Chinese-Canadian identity and perspective in the Anthropocene. Drifting through fast-paced urban time and space after growing up in a secluded and rural environment, I attempt to dissect the different cultural and philosophical aspects of my identity or being as a means to try and understand why I have such existential fears. Using print-based repetition of food-related emblems such as rice bowls, chopsticks, and gritty family-owned woks alongside long-lasting yet ephemeral synthetic materiality of the tarps, I reflect on the incessant act of self-digestion while also finding alternative modes of care and resistance as a homo/queer body when it comes to fighting blood-related angst. By taking into consideration the traditional, cultural, and philosophical Chinese expectation of continuing your blood lineage and my inability to do so as a queer body, as well as the idea of Chinese Canadian immigrants relying on labor and prosperity as a means of survival and presence, I ask myself and others: How much is at stake in terms of ensuring a long term presence or settled lineage for homo/queer and diasporic identities like myself? How can I, or will I ever, find my own sense of kinship or family? Where do individuals like myself lie within an incredibly labor and wealth oriented society?

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WOK HEI, OIL COUNTRY, + A BLUE CHINATOWN

Essay by Lee Rayne Lucke

WOK HEI LABOUR

I first met Kev Liang around a round table of food in a Chinese restaurant. Over the time that we’ve connected, I learned that Kev grew up in Trochu, a small town in Alberta near Calgary. Kev’s parents’ Chinese restaurant, Peking Cafe, was the Chinatown for the town Kev grew up in. Like how Chinatowns begin, Kev’s family restaurant was a means to make a living. The Chinese restaurant is typically an acceptable form of labour for new Chinese immigrants. Early Chinese settlers, usually men, were turned away from jobs that competed with Whites and so, were pushed into feminized forms of labour like cooking and laundry. Since their early arrival, Asian men have been emasculated in Western culture. They are portrayed as weak, effeminate, and lacking masculinity, perpetuating harmful stereotypes that contribute to discrimination and racism against the Asian community.


Listening to the sounds of the frying wok in Kev’s artwork installation titled jiā yóu!, I think about how I often hear children of Asian immigrants share about how their parents' way to show love is with food. In Chinese culture, to say hello, we ask: “have you eaten yet?” "chī le ma?". Bowls of cut fruit, hand wrapped dumplings, broths simmering for hours are part of these stories. It is not part of our parents' culture to say, “I love you”. Our parents show love, practicing the belief that actions speak louder than words. Kev told me that his parents said their children will never go hungry because of their restaurant. Kev’s dad might say restaurant work is poor labour, and at the same time the restaurant is a labour of love for his children.


RED THE COLOUR OF HAPPINESS

Kev and I are dressed in red. It's the lunar new year and we’re sitting in a circle around a large round table with artists who are also dressed in red. We’re eating Chinese new year foods that traditionally symbolize good luck. Much like how many of us are dressed in red for the new year, Chinatowns in our cities are recognized for being decorated in red. A celebratory colour, red represents happiness. Many Chinatowns are recognized in their cities for red street lamps, red gates, red signs, and red lanterns. Red isn’t the only symbolic colour in Chinese culture, but looking at our Chinatowns it would be fair to say that red is one of the most important colours in Chinese culture.


BLUE THE COLOUR OF GRIEF

In “jiā yóu!” Kev's Chinatown is blue. The gallery walls are covered in blue tarps. On the tarps are repeating white and yellow silk screened images of abstracted Chinatown gateway architecture taken from Edmonton as well as Vancouver. This Chinatown aesthetic which is widely recognized in many Chinatowns all over the world, is schematized and made modular so that the repetition looks exact and linear, speaking to ideas of mass production. Chinatowns throughout the world use this self-orientalizing aesthetic as a form of protection.


Entering the installation, it’s like looking at a cross section of Kev’s internal experience of the Chinatown he grew up in that is intimately tied to his family. What we’re taught to hide on the inside as children of immigrants, the artist reveals. As second generation, we are taught to hide and contain the complicated and sometimes painful diasporic experience of disconnection that comes into a cultural clash with the elders in our families and in our Chinatowns as well as a dissonance with the majority white world we live in. We don’t have a lot of immediate signifiers of belonging, especially in small towns. Kev Liang externalizes these feelings in material with the colour blue, a colour that isn’t immediately associated with Chinese culture, yet still holds its own symbolism within the culture. Here the artist uses the blue colour in a way that western culture immediately understands it: blue is the colour of grief and the colour of masculinity in the gender binary construct. The artist processes the dominant narratives and expectations placed upon him by his parents and society with the colour blue: to be a man, and to be valued as a man means having success, having wealth, being married to a woman, having children, and on top of all that: tall and strong. These are the dreams Kev’s parents have for him. These dreams that are tied to status are signs that many immigrant parents recognize as safety. A lot of people are trained to believe that the epitome of love is controlling somebody into safety. Stability and normalcy offer a sense of peace and security for our immigrant parents. It validates the painful experience of immigration. However, not often understood by our elders is that these dreams are tied to dominant systems that historically have overlooked and oppressed queer and racialized bodies. These are dreams that Kev cannot fulfill for his parents, there is a guilty agony tied to this blue yet a resistance is interwoven between the layers of polyethylene.


LIVING IN OIL COUNTRY

The blue tarp made of polyethylene or polypropylene is the material of oil, the resource most notably tied to the economy and the identity of Alberta. In Edmonton, the city Kev is now based in, the hockey team is named the Oilers. The team’s name was chosen because Alberta is the center of Canada’s petroleum industry. During the 2006 playoff run, the “This is Oil Country’ sign hung in the arena’s rafters above the crowds. Here, resource extraction is tied inextricably into culture. Here oil is a way of life. Even if Kev and I don’t identify with that type of “oil country” person, the type that spray paints “This is oil country” over a mural of climate activist Greta Thunberg; and even if you are not an Albertan, oil is at the center of our lives. Globally, oil is ubiquitous; it is in everything, it is how we move in our cars and planes, and it is used to make the houses we live in. The oil of the tarp is the material that structures and contains the “restaurant” in the gallery, a part of the representation of the home where the artist, Kev, was raised in.


YELLOW THE COLOUR OF RESISTANCE

jiā yóu!: Directly translated jiā means add and yóu means “oil”. jiā yóu' is the Mandarin romanization and “ga yau” is the Cantonese romanization. A common Chinese saying to encourage, the expression originates as a cheer in the 1960s at the Macau Grand Prix used to imply stepping harder on the gas pedal and metaphorically adding more fuel to the tank. In the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, ga yau became the rallying cry used for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, with the colour yellow becoming synonymous with the movement. In Hong Kong, yellow ribbons adorn railings and trees in public spaces; individuals wear yellow ribbons to show support; and a yellow economic circle, a form of consumer activism that classifies businesses based on their support or opposition to the protests, has been built.


I see Kev’s own yellow spirit of self-determination punctuated in the installation. Notably, a square of yellow Chinese motifs surround a plastic stack of bowls with a full bowl of rice and chopsticks. In Chinese culture, it is taboo to stick chopsticks straight up in a bowl of rice because it mimics the incense offered to ancestors. Playing with this superstition, Kev resists the narratives and expectations that are placed upon him by society. It’s a way to kindly express: “Thank you for involving me, but it’s best if I refrain from participating.”

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ALBERTA MORNING with Kev Liang

Kev Liang joins CKUA's Grant Stovel to discuss jiā yóu! and his identity as a queer, diasporic 2nd-generation Chinese-Canadian.

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Kev Liang is an emerging artist based in Edmonton, Treaty 6 territory, with a BFA in Printmaking and Intermedia with Distinction from the University of Alberta. Kev has exhibited at SNAP Gallery, Latitude 53, Art Museum at the University of Toronto for the 2021 BMO 1st! Art award, and more, with an upcoming solo exhibition opening at Calgary’s The New Gallery in January 2024. He tackles his homo/queer, diasporic 2nd-gen Chinese-Canadian identity and its existential anxieties of lineage and prosperity within the Anthropocene. Kev was a Production Assistant for The Works International Visual Arts Society, a Gallery Intern for Latitude 53, as well as a Gallery Attendant for Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre. Recently, he has been interested and involved in community-based artistic projects concerning Edmonton’s Chinatown such as Chinatown Greetings and AIYA Collective and will continue to seek opportunities to contribute towards our own communities as well as expand artistically elsewhere.


Lee Rayne Lucke is an artist, community organizer and cultural worker. Their work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to call attention, mobilize, or divert structures of power with collective artistic gestures and participatory processes. Together with an artist and Chinatown community group called aiya哎呀, they offer spaces to remember the emotional and geographic loss of amiskwacîwâskahikan’s Chinatown at its intersections. Through the lens of Chinatown, the work is postured to envision and practice better ways of being in the city. The work spans public interventions, satirical performance, capacity building with anti-oppression workshops such as “still in chinatown on indigenous land working space for artists and cultural workers”, organizing to form openings for better futures, and making social spaces of cultural care.

https://youtu.be/Za75TWGlUc4

https://youtu.be/YfMRRzefzwM

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中文翻译 Chinese Translation ...

加油！

通過基於鏡頭的過程，我創作多媒體敘事作品，利用印刷媒體和數字媒體，將其放置在一個環境空間中，以體現我在人類世中作為同性戀/酷兒、移民二代華裔加拿大人的身份和觀點中所存在的存在焦慮。在從僻靜的鄉村環境中長大後，在快節奏的城市時間和空間中漂泊，我試圖剖析我的身份或存在的不同文化和哲學方面，以試圖理解為什麽我會有這樣的生存恐懼。我使用印刷媒體重復食物相關的象征，如米飯碗、筷子和粗糙的家庭式炒鍋，以及持久而被短暫使用的塑料帆布材料，反思自噬的不間斷行為，同時尋找作為同性戀/酷兒身體的替代關懷和抵抗方式，以對抗與血緣相關的焦慮。在考慮到中國傳統、文化和哲學對於延續血脈的期望以及作為酷兒身體無法滿足這一期望的情況下，還有華裔加拿大移民依靠勞動和繁榮來生存和存在的觀念，我問自己和其他人：對於像我這樣的同性戀/酷兒和移民身份，確保長期存在或穩定的血統有多大的風險？我是否能夠找到自己的親緣關系或家庭感？在一個以勞動和財富為導向的社會中，像我這樣的個體在哪裏定位？

Kev Liang（他）是一位新興藝術家，目前居住在艾德蒙頓，位於第六條條約領土，在阿爾伯塔藝術大學以優異成績獲得版畫和跨媒體藝術學士學位。Kev的作品曾在SNAP畫廊、Latitude 53、多倫多大學藝術博物館（2021年BMO 1st！藝術獎）等地展出作品。他探索自己的同性戀/酷兒、移民二代華裔加拿大人的身份，並關註人類世中血統和繁榮的存在焦慮。Kev曾擔任The Works International Visual Arts Society的製片助理，Latitude 53的畫廊實習生，以及Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre的畫廊管理員。最近，他對以藝術為基礎的社區項目產生了興趣並參與其中，這些項目涉及艾德蒙頓的唐人街，如Chinatown Greetings 和 AIYA Collective，並將繼續尋求機會在我們自己的社區做出貢獻，並在其他地方進行藝術拓展。

中文翻译 Chinese Translation