Image: Pink and Yellow Still-life with Cherished Items (2022) by Atleigh Homma.
A mark here, again
Earlier this month the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival launched the interactive digital exhibition A mark here, again, which celebrates community spaces and cultural networks.
The online show highlights pan-Asian Canadian creators at all stages of their careers and includes a combination of archival works and new commissions by painter Atleigh Homma, illustrator Diana Nguyễn and artist-curator Emerald Repard-Denniston, all graduates of OCAD University. Artworks by Alexa Hatanaka and Paul Wong are also included.
The artists’ works experiment with personal histories and shared knowledge to propel social change and foster mutual care. A mark here, again frames place-making as a fertile starting point from which lines can be drawn between ancestral knowledge and contemporary life.
The exhibition includes Nguyễn's video work Still [Life] (2022), which addresses displacement experienced by residents of Toronto’s Chinatown neighbourhood. The piece features a ceramic vase, similar to the porcelain vessels with blue decoration popularized in China beginning in the 14th century. Nguyễn’s object combines clay and embroidery and is intentionally broken. Through the cracked spaces of the vase human figures cast in a warm light can be seen potting plants. The threads and fabric used to fabricate the work were collected from the factory where the artist’s mother works.
“During the process of making this piece, the visual that kept popping into my head was of plants growing through cement and walls. It is something that I have always been mesmerized by and found comforting because somehow these plants are able to grow, have their needs met through invisible helpers and thrive even when it seems impossible, which reminds me so much of the community within Chinatown,” Nguyễn explains in her artist statement.
"I wanted to...pay homage to the people of Chinatown, as well as my parents who, similarly to many living in Chinatown, are immigrants working hard labour jobs. This piece was built from a place of deep love for my parents and the people of Chinatown,” Nguyễn continues.
In the stop motion video, In Conflict with the Internal Occident and the External Orient - Story of Isolation (2021) Repard-Denniston foregrounds the experience of being a visible minority. The artist, who won the medal for Drawing and Painting at OCAD U this year was born in China, adopted by Canadian parents and raised in North Vancouver, British Columbia.
“The ways in which my body has navigated through life has been uncomfortable; Toronto’s Chinatowns feel foreign; China, my country of birth, has a great disconnect and is only visualized through photos and stories that my parents took when coming to adopt me; and North Vancouver has brought me up to assimilate socially and culturally to whiteness. It has left me with both an identity crisis and internalized racism,” Repard-Denniston notes.
Throughout the pandemic the artist has felt the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes personally. The artwork included in the exhibition examines these topics including the fragmentation of identity, Asian stereotypes and self-understanding.
In the work, Pink and Yellow Still-life with Cherished Items (2022), Atleigh Homma, a 2016 Drawing and Painting alum, reflects on her mixed-race identity and the family members that have come before her. Referencing, Japonisme, a French term that describes the influence of Japanese art and design on Western European artists in the 19th century as well as landscape paintings from Japan’s Edo period, Homma’s work combines styles to celebrate her familial connections.