Curatorial Project

MEMORY LANE

August 30-October 19, 2024
The New Gallery, Calgary, AB

Led by Yantong Li & Brubey Hu

Yuxiang Dong
Lan “Florence” Yee
Beichen Zhang
Shellie Zhang
Andong Zheng

Images courtesy of the artists.

Credit: Andong Zheng

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

—Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

In both its glaring proximity and opaqueness, memory is in itself a contradiction, like an image and picture, enacting both as a storage and a barricade of the past. In the exhibition, the works of Yuxiang Dong, Lan “Florence” Yee, Beichen Zhang, Shellie Zhang, and Andong Zheng pay homage to memory in all its disjunctures, with its irreproducibility from a personal level to the stipulated qualities from a collective perspective, memory is at once a site of relief as well as struggle. 

Both Lan “Florence” Yee and Beichen Zhang deploy gestures of reconciliation with loss. While Lan’s sensual gesture introspects an accelerated loss of information through the gradual reproduction of mundane and familial memories, Beichen’s nostalgia is attached to looted objects whose past was rendered increasingly inaccessible through colonial extraction. Moreover, by scaling “the guest greeting pines” as a manipulated apparatus of the empire, Andong brings forth issues of mass censorship and epistemological control in close proximity to the cultural imaginary of Pinus hwangshanensis (Huangshan Pine), reorienting the quotidian act of seeing as a political destination that deconstructs engrained imperial sentiment sitting behind practices of botanical taxonomy. Lastly, the works of Yuxiang Dong and Shellie Zhang unearth the racial economy of archives, in which the historical fabrication of a racialized imaginary of Chinese immigrants continues to haunt the contemporary portrayals of that past. 

The annal of history isn’t as linear as it seems, but full of twists and turns. Our nostalgia allures poignant attempts to resituate the affinities with our past, walking the ambiguous lane of the personal and the collective that weaves into each other’s constellations. In the process of retrieval, we cross paths with sites unseen and lanes unventured, distorting our visions, rendering its parts inaccessible, chiselling parts more lucid.

ARTISTS

  • Yuxiang Dong

    DONG Yuxiang (born 1990, Wujiang, Jiangsu Province, China) is an art, educational, and social worker. His current practices and research are driven by the contradiction between ethnography in the Anthropocene and speculation of object-oriented ontology. He received an Honorable Mention of the PhMuseum Photography Grant (2023) and was a longlist of The Lumen Prize for Art and Technology (2023) and a finalist of the Three Shadows Photography Award (2016). He has exhibited at Hermitage Museum & Gardens, Norfolk, VA (US), OCAT Institute, Beijing (China); Verzasca Foto, Canton of Ticino (Switzerland); Jakarta International Photo Festival, Jakarta, (Indonesia); PhMuseum Days, PhMuseum, Bologna (Italy); and other international venues. His documentaries and filmic works have been screened at Obskuur Ghent Film Festival (Belgium), Doc. Boston Documentary Film Festival (US), Stay Art Festival (China), and other global festivals.

  • Lan "Florence" Yee

    Lan "Florence" Yee

    Lan “Florence” Yee is a visual artist and cultural worker based in Tkaronto / Toronto & Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal. They collect text in underappreciated places and ferment it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Lan’s work has been exhibited at the Textile Museum of Canada (2023-24), Darling Foundry (2022), the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), among others. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U as a Joseph-Armand Bombardier SSHRC scholar. Lan has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Council for the Arts, and the Toronto Arts Council. They are a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists (2023). Lan is a member of JIA Foundation as curator of the Chinatown House MTL.

  • Beichen Zhang

    The practice of Beichen Zhang often manifests in the form of photography, essay films, mixed media installations and institutional research. His multimedia works query and investigate the relationship between cultural heritages and Asian colonial history, archive and geopolitical vicissitude, and the identity’s fluidity within a postcolonial context, with visual metonymy as a carrier of personal narratives that encompass archaeological and anthropological research. Zhang has exhibited on numerous international platforms, such as the 8th Daegu Photo Biennale in South Korea, the 34th Image Forum Festival in Tokyo, the 2022 Jimei X Arles International Photo Festival and more. He has received numerous international accolades, including the nomination for the Foam Paul Huf Award 2023, the nominations for the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2023, the Best Portfolio Prize of the 8th Singapore International Photography Festival (2022), the selected Artist of Top 20.21 Chinese Contemporary Photographer (2021) and more.

  • Shellie Zhang

    Shellie Zhang

    Shellie Zhang creates images, objects and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Zhang is interested in oral and local history, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved. Zhang has exhibited at venues including Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. In 2017, She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award. Her work is in public collections such as the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. Zhang is a founding board member of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust. In Fall 2024, she will be pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture at Yale University.

  • Andong Zheng

    Andong Zheng (b. 1992, Hefei) lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands. He received his MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019 and is currently pursuing studies in the Master Photography & Society program at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. With a background in engineering, Zheng was trained to focusing on micro details within strict causal frameworks but often found himself doubting macro structures. Inspecting and destabilizing are his frequent gestures to engage with the external world photographically. He is curious about how images traverse the boundaries of rationality while refusing to simplify his practice to the mapping of established knowledge systems. His recent work investigates the intersection of botanical studies (with its colonial past) and contemporary geopolitical contexts.