Left: Lam Wong, Museum of Psychiatry and Love, 2019, oil and acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun + Lam Wong (王藝林)
Sept 23 to Dec 23, 2021
Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden
LOOK TOWARDS THE SUN is an artistic exchange between Lam Wong, a Chinese Canadian diaspora artist from Hong Kong and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, an artist of Cowichan and Syilx First Nations ancestry. All living beings and spirits are interconnected. We reside under the same sun. Creating reflection and dialogue on environmental concerns and the interconnectedness of place, people, and culture is at the essence of this exhibition.
Yuxweluptun’s bold paintings unreservedly celebrate and assert Indigenous ways of living and being. His work shines a powerful light on Indigenous title, rights, and sovereignty on unceded territories. Wong’s expressive paintings and contemplations as an immigrant shape his practice as the artist-in-residence at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. This show includes a personal response to the horrific findings of the remains of 215 children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the school that Yuxweluptun is a survivor of.
As communities combat the harmful impacts of anti-Indigenous and anti-Asian racism, we are reminded by Yuxweluptun and Wong to look towards the sun – to continually seek and reveal truth, to look within, to unlearn, to create connections, to reclaim, to restore, to more fully know who we are as individuals and nations. This exhibition is held on traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl’ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.