Emerald Repard-Denniston

Curator's note:

Last year was the first time I had been to Asia since I was adopted in May 2001. It had been too long and I needed to come back to my motherland. I returned to China to do a birth family search—something I thought would be a lifelong task. My body was turning in on itself. The timer had been set.

I was shocked that I found my biological family after only a month and a half. I spent five days with them in a small village, an hour outside of Hengyang, Hunan Province.

The Zou’s—my family—sell fireworks for a living. We set them off together in their courtyard.

My sister, jiajia, texted me before the reunion (translated through WeChat): although we have not been together but our hearts have been linked to her, love her. Find her its the biggest hurt for the rest of my parents life. Dont hate your parents, parents are under the pressure of the government policies at the time, and there is no one to help them. There is nothingnothig we can do if we can't eat.

The last four years of my life I have met some very special people who I have had the pleasure to co-exist alongside and who have also gone through their own homecomings.

I met Serene’s friend Katia in Japan, we were both stopping through there before continuing on our travels. We were going into it blind, which felt very riveting and terrifying. Serene went to Taiwan for several months to visit her family and to pickup on a life she had there when she was a child. This trip back to Asia was a big deal for both of us. Along the way, I met Priscilla in Taiwan through Serene and Katia, and we all became friends.

Back in Toronto, Hayley, Tizzi, and I all went to school together, I feel as though we have throughlines to our work that sync up. Tongzhou and I are both transracial Chinese adoptees. We met a few years ago while she was here in Toronto for her friends screening at Reel Asian Film Festival. We both interrogate our identities throughout our work. I met Jasmine at an art opening and have been intrigued with her practice since.

Our lives and practices give me immense amount of motivation, inspiration, and solidarity.

• Emerald

Main exhibition text:

I notice a sound that’s out of place: silence on a busy street; thunder in January; birds chirping in the dead of night.

Homecoming is both a collective and singular act. It involves a departure, an overnight flight, a pendulum swinging back and forth across the Pacific Ocean. A homecoming is perpetually uncanny. It’s familiar, yet off-putting. Were the streets always this loud? Was the sun always so bright? Has my grandmother always looked so old?

This multimedia exhibition challenges and reinterprets the concept of a “homecoming” as the artists grapple with contradictory emotions and representations of Asianness and Asia as a material space.

Canada has become a reluctant nexus for Asian diasporas. We were never really wanted here, and yet, there are now nearly two million Canadians who identify as either Chinese or Taiwanese. Making the voyage from Canada to East Asia can vary anywhere between six to over twenty hours of travel. Plane tickets can go for thousands of dollars, and in today’s fast paced gig economy, trips home can be few and far between.

Haley Chiu’s Crossings in mist (2023)is a small series painted during the artist’s first visit to Hong Kong after four years. Recreating mundane still-life images that focus on texture and colours of the landscape, Chiu is fascinated with the strong contrast and brilliance found everywhere in Hong Kong.

These oil paintings—The happiest building, Zhong Kui, and Abode—aim to capture a melancholic image of home. Small in scale with expressive handling of the medium, they are intimate, close, and fleeting.

“I find I always feel this way knowing that I’ll have to leave soon, and I hold onto these precious moments until the next time I return.”

As our collective histories have shown, a return is never simple.

For Tong Zhou Lafrance, the concept of homecoming is troubled by transnational migration. A Chinese adoptee herself, Lafrance’s artistic practice revolves around the alteration of family and travel archives to bring out her own agency. In From China, To Canada (2021) and The Chinese Dream: Loading … (2024) Lafrance delicately dissects the nature of self in face of migration and nostalgia.

Lafrance is interested in the issues of multiple identities, the materiality of memories, the migratory process, and the transmission of Chinese transcultural heritage.

What seems contradictory becomes complementary to her journey of self-learning: navigating the sense of (be)longing.

This impetus for self-learning in one’s homecoming is shared with Tizzi Tan, whose self-interrogation and quest for belonging has spanned continents.

Each return home by Tan was accompanied by the realization that the past she once knew was slipping away. The concept of "home" had become a fluid, elusive notion: sometimes distant and at times just a backward glance.

Yet what home should be like is still anchored steadily in all of Tan’s young memories. Tan infuses each new landscape encountered with the rituals and routines of her youth, attempting to preserve a dear connection to her origins.

Spring, Potato, Red Seagulls(2024) serves as the blueprint for the enduring concept of home. Tan assembles a unique blend of elements—a model train track, photos of her hometown sewn into a miniature tent made from her own vintage clothing, a blown-up image of her belly button.

Tan’s work does not exist on its own. She invites viewers to reflect on their own journeys of nostalgia and self-actualization.

Likewise, Priscilla Yin Barker’s work grapples with the slippery notions of home and self. Car Drive, Ode to Mop (2023) is a film taken throughout Barker’s return to Taiwan, where an orthognathic surgical operation drastically altered her facial appearance. A loss of bodily autonomy from the surgery was conflated with her a-ma’s fears of aging. Thus, her body served as a stand-in for her grandfather’s body, who her a-ma was simultaneously mourning.

Hyper-aware of her reflection in every surface, Barker envisions her skin becoming the surface of the walls and form of the mop. Fixated on the surface, these inanimate objects become personified beings, bearing imprints and scars similar to human skin.

The mop became an idealized form: long hair, thin, an existence of servitude for the domestic. The surfaces of bodies, objects, and architecture contain impermanent histories. In the cropping of the frame, the body becomes desexualized and scarcely becomes an imprint.

The notion of “home” and identity is further muddled by larger crises. Climate breakdown, state violence, imperialism—we say we are not touched by these things, but the frown lines on our mother’s faces say otherwise. In our own self-indulgent moments, a shock—like a typhoon or a brutal government crackdown—reminds us that there are forces beyond our control.

This Table that Raised Me Forms my Hands into Joy (2024) by Serene Yi-shuan Mitchell interrogates the instability of home and identity as a result of geopolitical conflict.This table that raised me forms my hands into joy is a two-part installation consisting of a diorama of her aunt’s dining room table and a point-of-view video of the artist sorting through ephemera she collected during her most recent trip to Taiwan in 2023. The ephemera is seen twice in the installation: scattered and hidden amongst other items on the messy table, and in the video, organized in a box, like a fond in an archive.

The last trip Mitchell and her mother took to Taiwan was the most uncertain she has ever felt about the island’s future. While Mitchell returns to Taiwan infrequently, her mother returns home every year. Taiwan’s position as a frontier in China and America’s cold war for global hegemony has become increasingly precarious. Her aunt, like many Taiwanese people, had started processes of immigration abroad in case of invasion.

Centered around her aunt’s dining room table — where Mitchell sat in her first memories, returned to for countless family reunions, and had family stories passed down— the installation aims to show the value of personal archiving in uncertain times and explore the potential meanings that can be given to mundane items when memories become fleeting. Even more, it is an ode to the Taiwan that Mitchell’s mother loves. Placing collected ephemera associated with childhood, family, and home, into a scene they naturally existed but could, one day, never return to, Mitchell processes the contrasting coexistence of comfort and anxiety, allowing joy to triumph over fear.

(I belong here, but I don’t. It’s a memory I have of someone I never knew. It’s a beautiful country but it does not belong to me.)

An eerie rift opens between memory and home. Ancestral houses; cramped dormitories; sparkling high-rises built with foreign money. A drain in the center of a tile bathroom, water drip

drip

dripping away.

We wander through clean, sterile convenience stores. It looks like one we stopped by in Kanata, but there’s something not quite right. Maybe it’s the smell of the soy eggs, or the soft rumble of motorcycles passing by.

In light of neoliberal capitalism’s hegemony over housing development, anywhere could bear a semblance of Home. Capitalism has flattened regional differences and quirks. In Second Life Oblique (2024), Jasmine Yangqingqing Yu investigates residential architectural forms and their representational strategies in both China and North America.

For the immigrant, home becomes in-between places: awkward, jettisoned, (not quite) mobile, unsettled, hopeful, fatigued. Their time out-of-jointed, their presence uncanny. A continual longing for stability and security simultaneously rests in a body urging to resign to a nomadic existence. Second lives lived before the first is even over.

Yu samples from frameworks and physical sites in which the artist had claimed home. Architectural debris, dust, earwigs, traces of brick arrangements, earth, and bas relief impressions point to ghosts that continue to simulate and double. Yu employs contrasting perspectives, namely the oblique angle used in Chinese landscape paintings and cartography, to interject and fixate.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. - Heraclitus

Each return home is different. Each time, home changes. We change. We grow older. And the journey is never complete: you can leave and come back and leave again and again. Each time, we notice a sound that we cannot quite place.

But more often than not, the sound is calm and inviting, like the inside of a seashell. The sound is a still point in the turning universe. The sound is a beautiful feeling. A warm sound that reassures us that a departure is not final, but is instead a simple “see you again soon.”

The sound is a blanket of light. It’s a signal that what is unknown is also generative. That what is strange can be exciting. It reminds us that if we cannot find a gentle, kind world in the current diaspora, we will create one for ourselves. It is deeply felt and melancholic. It is a solemn vow to hold our sadness and joy together. Until next time.

Additional prose:

One: A group of turtles sunbathe on a rock.

Two: I think about all the time I didn’t spend here. I think about the person I would’ve been.

Sometimes it feels like a hug.

Sometimes it feels like a stomach ache.

Four: Mid-rise apartments gave way to hollow skyscrapers, leaking light pollution into the night sky. I looked out at the motorcyclists, their headlights crawling like a river of red and white through the narrow street. They were riding into a sea of light.

Maybe some of them had just clocked off work. They were weary-eyed but full of hunger and warmth. Maybe some were just starting to leave on clandestine journeys, enroute to see a lover somewhere down the east coast. Maybe they weren’t lonely. Maybe they had nothing to miss.

Five: We went to Yangmingshan. It was overcast at first, but once we reached the summit the clouds parted to reveal the sweeping panorama below:

the smoggy city,

the rolling mountains,

the vast Pacific.

(I listened to Serene talk about her new Mandarin class, how it was once funded by the CIA but not anymore. She talked about how bad the Taiwanese minimum wage was and how long her work hours were. She talked about how her Ama had three names: one in Japanese, one in Hokkein, one in English. All these names for different purposes. All these names created three people that was just one person.)

Six: I looked towards Keelung harbour, searching for those freighters.

There they were.

From my vantage, they looked like toy ships. Tiny vessels nestled along the coast, bright spots against the blue ocean. If someone hadn’t pointed them out, you probably wouldn’t notice them.

Playlist (centre fold):

More Than I Can Say by 江玲 and The Fabulous Echoes

想呀想起你 by 杨钰莹

Submerge FM by Yaeji

挪威的森林 by Wu Bai

The Second Waltz, Op. 99a by André Rieu and the Johann Strauss Orchestra

Foudre by Karim Ouellet

Year to Year by Yaeji and OHHYUK

Selfish Soul by Sudan Archives

Nobody Sees Me Like You Do by Yoko Ono and The Apples in Stereo

No Return by Swordes

嘻唰唰 - TRANCE重拍混音版 by 花兒樂隊

云宫迅音 by 徐镜清

Bios:

Artists

Priscilla Yin Barker (b. 1999 Toronto/Tkaronto) is an artist and designer interested in representations of home as mediations between the individual and the built environment. Her work addresses the implications of domestic space through their production and architectural representation. She holds an HBA in Architecture and Visual Studies from the University of Toronto, and is currently an MArch candidate at the Yale School of Architecture.

Hayley Chiu (b.2001, Markham, Canada) is an artist. She is inspired by the long and diverse history of her culture—a culture that she was never fully a part of. Chiu appropriates imagery from Chinese culture and combines them with symbolism from her own life, transcending time and place through this new narrative. Chiu’s practice combines high realism and overtly overlaid images, breaking the illusion that her paintings are direct representations of reality. Instead, her paintings explore the mythologies we create to add charm in a mundane life.

童宙 Tong Zhou Lafrance (b.1998, China) is a multidisciplinary artist studying for an MFA in fiber and textile art at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China. In 2021, she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Concordia University, Montreal. In 2022, she co-founded Soft Gong Collective, the first francophone organization by and for Chinese adoptees.

Serene Yi-shuan Mitchell (b.1999, Taipei, Taiwan) lives and works in Tkaronto/Toronto. She graduated from McGill in 2022. Her thesis examined archival Asian Canadian literary magazines. She is a writer and archivist drawn to historical fiction, video, photo, and dioramas as vessels for familial storytelling. Mitchell is a founding member of the Pan Asian Collective (PAC) in Montreal and a member of Slip Art Collective.

Tizzi Tan (b.1997, Yunnan, China) is a multidisciplinary lens-based artist. She studied visual art in Sheridan and received an BFA Photography from OCADU, currently lives and works in Toronto. Her artistic exploration focuses on the situations of individuals and nature under the influence of social changes. Grounded, approachable and intimate, Tan’s work zooms in on subtle details that linger between the real and unreal.

Jasmine Yangqingqing Yu (b.1999, Nanjing, China) is an artist and writer based in Nanjing and Toronto. Informed by representations and paraphernalia of architectural forms, Yu investigates horror and eroticism, and their representational strategies. Yu mines the image’s vindictive limit of what is unspeakable: the horrifically barely formed and speculative; untethered from the codification and law-making of language and its physical manifestations; unstable yet sedimentized.

Curator:

Emerald Repard-Denniston (b.2000, Hengyang, China) is a visual artist based in Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh Musqueam/Vancouver, and Tkaronto/Toronto. She is a multidisciplinary artist drawn to oil painting, curatorial, and activist work. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University with a Minor in Art and Social Change (2022). Repard-Denniston is the co-founder and current organizer for the Shoes Off Collective and is a member of The Plumb.

Zine writer + editor:

Katia Lo Innes (b.1999, London, Canada) is a writer and journalist. She is the associate producer at The Breach. Her work has appeared in Maisonneuve, THIS, In the Mood, and other publications. She is the co-founder of Garbage Day Zine.

1. Hayley Chiu, Zhong Kui, 6.75" x 9.625",oil on panel, 2023
2. Jasmine Yangqingqing Yu, Second Life Oblique, mylar, clay, vinyl adhesive, 2024
3. Priscilla Yin Barker, Car Drive, Ode to Mop, 6:44min, short film, 2023
4. Hayley Chiu, The Happiest Building, 7.5" x 10", oil on panel, 2023
5. 童宙 Tong Zhou Lafrance, The Chinese Dream, 30” x 20”, photo weaving, 2023
6. 童宙 Tong Zhou Lafrance, From China to Canada, 30” x 9.5”, photo weaving, 2023
7. Tizzi Tan, Spring, Potato, Red Seagulls, 40”x50”, photo & train track, hand sewn tent, 2024
8. Hayley Chiu, Abode, 7.5" x 10",oil on panel, 2023

Serene Yi-shuan Mitchell, This Table that Raised Me Forms my Hands into Joy, archival material, replica models, video display, 2024