Insight into a world and an issue many Vancouverites, who live in part of the Cantosphere, may not know about:
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(TRANSGRESSION/CANTOSPHERE)
Hong Kong Exile
in collaboration with Zoe Lam and Howie Tsui
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Centre A Gallery – 229 East Georgia Street
January 22 – March 28, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, January 22 | 7pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm
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As part of a long effort to standardize language throughout China, in 2012, at the behest of authorities in Beijing, and to uproar throughout the Canto-sphere, the Guangdong local government enacted the Guangdong National Language Regulations: a set of regulations that squeezes Cantonese language off of the airwaves and removes it from use in the public sector including government offices and schools. Even autonomous Hong Kong is facing pressures from these homogenizing forces.
Here in Vancouver, ominous signs of Mandarinisation have hovered over Chinatown in recent years. In one example, due either to ignorance of local circumstances or an intention to appeal to Mainland Chinese buyers, Westgroup, the developer of a condo at Keefer and Main, greeted Canada’s foremost Cantonese and other Yuht (
) language speaking neighbourhood with a massive “NI HAO”. “Hello” in the main languages of Chinatown is not “Ni hao,” rather, it is “Nei hou” and “Lei hou”, depending on dialect. For locals, Westgroup’s sign was a reminder of broader forces of cultural loss. …
In the film Everything Will Be…, Julia Kwan’s melancholic portrait of an aging Chinatown in decline, real estate marketer Bob Rennie asserts that the future of Chinatown will be more “multicultural,” while simultaneously being portrayed as engaging in the museafication of the neighbourhood’s heritage. The emergence of Euro-American galleries and businesses over the last few years along with condos marketed to a predominantly white creative class attest to the impending displacement of Canada’s most deeply rooted -scape. …
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(transgression/cantosphere), interdisciplinary art company Hong Kong Exile (Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Milton Lim, Remy Siu), in collaboration with linguist Zoe Lam and artist Howie Tsui, grapple with local and international pressures on their mother culture. The exhibit strikes back with a potent celebratory engagement with Cantonese language coupled with a reflection on the relationship between urban planning and the multiculturalisation of “Historic Chinatown.”
Wow! I thought I was the only one (and a hapa at that) to catch the great insult of “Ni Hao” sign in a predominantly Cantonese-speaking neighbourhood… was it racism on the part of Westgroup (ie. the schoolyard refrain that I am intimately familiar: “ching ching chong chang – it all sounds the same to me”) or clever target-marketing to mainland Chinese investors? Either way I’m glad someone with true bilingual or polyglot bona fides has reflected artistically on this nuanced issue.