At Capture Photography Festival, Gloria Wong draws on a rich archive of Chinatown and family images
Pendulum Gallery’s Here and Now exhibit juxtaposes self-portrait with studio shots by early-20th century’s Yucho Chow
Gloria Wong, Self Portrait as my grandmother (after Yucho Chow), from the “fictive genealogies” series. Courtesy of the artist
Capture Photography Festival presents Here and Now at the Pendulum Gallery until April 28
THE PAST CENTURY mixes fluidly with the present in Gloria Wong’s sly and exquisitely arranged self-portrait at Capture Photography Festival’s Here and Now exhibition.
Dominating the wall, Self Portrait as my grandmother (after Yucho Chow), from her “fictive genealogies” series, draws from the traditions of archival portraiture from the early 1900s—not just by Chinatown’s first commercial photographer, Yucho Chow, but from formal images of her family in Macau and Hong Kong.
Originally inspired by a studio portrait of her own grandmother in Macau, it features a lily placed in an ornate Chinese vase, sitting atop a slim decorative table with curvy legs. The black-and-white checkered floor mimics the setting in Chow’s studio, as does the black curtain in the background—an element the photographer adopted when his space was damaged by fire in 1935. Wong stands with her back to us, turning her head to the side. The pleated dress she wears could be vintage or contemporary—Wong says she doesn’t own a traditional cheongsam like her grandmother wore, and felt it would look too much like a costume.
In the photograph’s most clever touch, she holds a clicker whose wire slithers off screen. As she puts it in a phone conversation with Stir, she makes her agency explicit: “I wanted to make sure that it was evident that it was me taking my own image.”
The shot is one of six on a wall: the four-by-six-foot photo sits at the centre of old family portraits, including the original of her grandmother, along with some of Chow’s images—uncovered in research by local archivist Catherine Clement (work that resulted in the book Chinatown Through a Wide Lens: The Hidden Photographs of Yucho Chow). One of that artist’s portraits features a white lily in a vase almost identical to the one in Wong’s carefully constructed self-portrait.
“I thought it would be interesting to sort of trace lineages of a Chinese studio portrait tradition, but across these different times and places, and then to reconstruct an archive in that way,” Wong explains. “So the image of myself brings in elements from the Chow images as well as the ones from my own family archives. So in a way I’m trying to create a dialogue between myself and Yucho Chow and these unnamed photographers that had taken images of my family long before I was born.”
Chow, a 2020 Emily Carr University grad, is one of the rising talents amid mid-career and senior artists on view in the Here and Now exhibit that celebrates Captures 10th anniversary. Each artist was commissioned to respond to this place’s landscape, history, people, or culture as a way of exploring the diversity of the city.
Wong, a young artist who has long explored history, family, and identity in her work, happened to be on six-month stint in Norway when she received the commission, which sent her digging into archival material from abroad before returning here to complete the project.
She was instantly drawn to the work of Chow. “We learn in school that we're very lucky to live in a city that has such a rich photographic history—and I'm grateful for the education that I got, and the fact that I've learned about Jeff Wall and Stan Douglas and all of these other names,” Wong says. “But I thought it'd be interesting to bring out the ones that had gone more unrecognized in Vancouver's history. That's sort of how the project came about.”
On one hand, the Victorian ideals of turn-of-the-last-century studio photography speak to a colonial tradition. And the family portraits, of her own clan as well as the ones depicted in Chow’s work, have a formality that speaks to the luxury of photography almost a century ago—a time when people might invest in a family picture once a decade, versus the shot-a-minute documentation that goes on in our digital era. The artist adds that the large-format photographs didn’t allow for a lot of spontaneity: subjects had to stand still. The installation at Here and Now, part of her “fictive genealogies” series, draws parallels between the traditions of portraiture in colonial Hong Kong and Macau, before her parents and grandmother migrated here, with the way it carried over on colonial Canada’s West Coast, in Vancouver’s Chinatown neighbourhood.
But Wong is also drawn to the way the images diverge from more anthropological-ethnic photographic traditions, shot by outsiders.
“It was interesting because a lot of the history of photography, especially of racialized persons, takes a very ethnological approach,” she reflects. “But these images were made by people who were very much a part of the community. It was a very different approach.
“And then, I think, obviously photography has historically been used as a colonial tool in a lot of ways,” she adds, “and so I think even just putting these images together creates an archive that is sort of situated outside of the very Western canon.”
Gloria Wong, Mahjong, from the “Rituals” series. Courtesy of the Artist.
Gloria Wong, Mahjong, from the “Rituals” series. Courtesy of the artist
Visitors to Here and Now will be able to make instant, meaningful connections with Wong’s previous high-profile public artwork at Capture 2022: her “Rituals” series of shots of herself and her grandmother—the same one as in the portrait in “fictive genealogies”—that lined the wall of the Stadium-Chinatown Skytrain station over the past year.
The images document herself and her grandmother performing everyday domestic tasks—some drawn from Hong Kong/Macanese culture, such as stacking mahjong tiles and making dumplings, and others more universal, such as peeling oranges and sewing. Significantly, the pair never share the same frame: Wong captured them separately doing the activities. It was a way to capture the slight disconnect between the two: Wong explains that she doesn’t speak much Cantonese and her grandmother doesn’t speak much English, so they bonded through physical tasks that her elder taught her.
“I'm interested in the way that the images can sort of represent that relationship between my grandma and I, but I wanted to make sure we were separated, to sort of point to that barrier between us, whether culturally or through language, or even generationally,” Wong explains.
Wong says she also wanted to suggest the way that traditions sometimes change from generation to generation—especially after migration.
“The mahjong tiles [images] I thought were really interesting, because I don't know how to play mahjong—she never taught me,” she adds. “But my grandma would always let us stack the tiles. And so that's why in the images, we're not actually playing a game. We're not at a table or anything. I'm just like helping her stack tiles, and I think it's interesting that her hands hold a different sort of tension there.”
Just as in the fictive genealogies images at the Pendulum Gallery exhibition, Wong manages to bring different generations, times, and places together. In the process, she expresses the Asian diasporic identity in complex new ways. In a city with such a rich and complicated history of migration as Vancouver, she shows the way the Here and Now connects with the Far-away and Past.
Gloria Wong, works from the Rituals series, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Michael Love
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