Marlene Yuen | After Gold Mountain: Selected Stories of Chinese Labourers in Canada
May 12th – August 19th, 2017, Workers Arts & Heritage Centre, Hamilton, Ontario.
By Tor Lukasik-Foss
Marlene Yuen, Cheng Foo: Story of a Railroad Labourer. Screen printed accordion book, 2017.
I’ve decided I have to be careful how much time I spend trying to understand the Hamilton Art Crawl in its current form; it feels increasingly dangerous the more I try to unravel its economic and social engine. This past Friday I got stuck on the paintings of Batman and other pop culture regurgitations offered by street vendors; they were roughly the same price as two wine goblets of craft beer served within the cinder block chic of the new Merit brewery. I still don’t know how exactly those two things correlate, but in my heart, I’m positive they do.
James Street is throbbing with commerce, which can be either thrilling or unnerving depending on my mood. Yes, there are still a string of galleries and artist-run centres offering consistently sturdy exhibitions (Andy DeCola’s tea stained collages at the Assembly Gallery are a current highlight), but these venues no longer anchor the crawl, not in the way they used to. They can barely pierce the din. There was a time when art had a real mission on James North. Now it seems to be struggling to declare its relevance amid what more and more seems like a tourist event.
These thoughts were still with me the Saturday following, as I wandered down to the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre in mid-afternoon to take in Marlene Yuen’s After Gold Mountain. Yuen is a print and bookmaker based in Vancouver, and this is her first solo exhibition.
Initially I felt a bit deflated by the installation. Uniformly hung with black-and-white comic pages, enlarged from the originals, these images were missing the ‘big gesture’ I am so habituated to expect from a contemporary exhibition. Slowly however, the uniformity stopped being a liability and turned instead into the show’s major strength. There is no dazzle here, and dazzle is precisely what this exhibition doesn’t need.
After Gold Mountain is comprised of seven contained narratives, along with a pair of two-colour screen-printed accordion-fold book works in the center of the room. Each self-contained narrative mines a nugget of the difficult history of Chinese immigrants trying to navigate both the tough conditions and abundant racism of Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries.
There is a matter-of-fact quality to these histories. The tragedies and injustices are never amplified for dramatic effect as much as they are calmly, soberly pointed out. Victorious moments are also quietly delivered: such as that of women like Jean Lumb, whose activism helped reform Canada’s severe immigration laws and who became the first Chinese Canadian woman to earn the Order of Canada or Mary Ko Bong, a jazz performer and fine instrument mechanic trained in Hamilton.
Marlene Yuen, Sam Chong Laundry. Digital print, 2017.
The stories range from a salmon canning factory in B.C., to a lunch counter in Alberta, to a Chinese laundry on John Street in Hamilton, to the systemic exploitation of Chinese workers who mined tunnels through 13 mountains during the construction of the Trans-Canada railway. Taken together, there emerges a troubling pattern wherein Chinese immigrants are dehumanized by arduous, impoverished work, only to endure a second dehumanization when those jobs are mechanized, modernized, or unrecognized. Yuen correctly considers it heroic that her subjects survived or thrived in these conditions.
The mission behind this project, and the pragmatic yet graceful means of its delivery seem hard to challenge. As much as this is an exhibition of Marlene Yuen’s creative output, it is also a lovely demonstration of how an artistic practice can facilitate a larger function, one clearly rooted in history, activism, and community storytelling. I think if I had encountered Yuen’s work in book form outside a gallery context, I would have taken some of this for granted; having a quiet space in which to consider these narratives allowed for a better understanding of the endeavor Yuen has undertaken.
And I think this is why Yuen’s exhibition was such a fine antidote to the art crawl that preceded it. A worker’s museum can use visual art as a means to talk about labour history; it can also argue visual art as worthy labour in itself. After Gold Mountain fulfills both. It is, I think, more of a challenge to carve as venerable a space for visual art in the ever-inflating entrepreneurial economy that is Art Crawl.
Tor Lukasik-Foss is a visual artist, performer and writer. He is a founding member of the artists collective TH&B and currently works as the Director of Programs and Education at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.