Foreword for the Relations: Diaspora and Painting, Exhibition Catalogue.

by emily jan, 2020.

One afternoon several years ago, when I was home visiting my parents in California, the doorbell rang. I opened the door to a little old lady holding a cardboard box. She said something in Mandarin, handed me the box, and unceremoniously left. I opened it, and out wafted the odour of inks and rice paper, old brocade and mothballs—a bouquet I can only describe as the infinite distance between here and the old country. The box contained several scrolls of my grandfather’s calligraphy and a hand-bound book of my grandmother’s watercolours. My grandparents had both been dead for decades.

For those of us who live in diaspora, there are thousands of miles embedded in the word relations. I opened the book and looked at the pictures, familiar yet remote, and unrolled the scrolls, which I couldn’t read. Language often doesn’t survive the transplanting, since assimilation was the goal for many generations, including mine. As my English has gained dexterity, my first language, Mandarin, has dwindled to a vestigial stump. Images, however, are not contained by geography or lexicon; they can cross an ocean of water or an ocean of words and lose no legibility. Neither are they subject to the timescale of a human life, fragile walking bags of seawater and consciousness that we are.

Perhaps that is why I wound up as an artist too. While my grandmother was a traditional Chinese painter, rendering birds and flowers and long-lost landscapes, I became a sculptor. The things I make are ecosystems of a sort; equal parts awkward and magical, they operate under their own logic in which the human is largely subsumed into hybrids of flora and fauna, object and detritus. I see kinship and indeterminacy everywhere I look, likely the result of residing in so many different places over the years, in monolithic cities and far out in the bundu both.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, or so they say in my parents’ field of biology, meaning that the development of an individual embryo echoes the evolution of the whole species. Or to paraphrase: that one life contains within it all the history that brought it to pass in the first place. My own trajectory has bounced around the globe like a lotto ball, taking me from California to the East Coast to the desert Southwest of the United States, then to South Africa and Oaxaca state, and ultimately to Montreal. From here, I have travelled from Dawson City to Newfoundland, from edge to edge of this vast and beautiful terrain that some call Canada. If my grandparents’ generation was the drawn bow that catapulted us out of the old country, our generation is the arrow, still flying toward some unknown future.

Of course, mine is just one in a myriad of stories; there are as many narratives of diaspora as there are grains of sand on the beach. From a distance they may present uniformity, but up close they are a thousand mineral hues. Standing before the work in Relations, this is what I see: colour and movement, the intimate gaze of strangers, the ground by other light, under unfamiliar stars. I see the pantheon of gods who travelled here with us, fractured, and then reformed into something new. And I feel my own edges blur a bit, staring into the stereoscopic overlap of two or more senses of the word home.

At the end of the day, images persist. They arrive on your doorstep unannounced one fall afternoon, in a cardboard box borne by an elderly woman with whom you share only fragments of a language. They tell us who we once were, but we may also use them to create our own, hybrid likenesses for those who will come after us, for whom we will be the ancestors.