OCCUPYING CHINATOWN was Paul Wong’s year-long artist residency at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, During this year-long residency, Wong created a series of multidisciplinary artworks based on 700 letters in Chinese sent by 90 writers to his mother Suk-Fong Wong from 1956 to 2016, and other ephemera.
“Above all, I have approached this out of curiosity about what has been lost through silence,” Wong explained. “Occupying Chinatown has provided a conceptual frame for inspiring a prolific outpouring of artworks combining fragments of memory, language, and ephemeral histories. It has continued and will continue to allow me to look at everyday things as anything but ordinary.”
His new book Occupying Chinatown, is a beautifully detailed, limited edition hardcover book, fully bilingual in English and Simplified Chinese, focusing on several of Wong’s major artworks exploring Chinese-Canadian identity and his engagement with Vancouver’s Chinese communities.
Essays by Paul Wong, Christopher Lee, and Debbie Cheung.
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SIGNED
Hardcover
179 pages