A Smashing Exploration of Chinese Identity

On a cool spring evening at the Richmond Cultural Centre, a woman in a surgical gown, safety glasses and rubber gloves is smashing the living shit out of a tiny maquette of a traditional Chinese house.

At the sound of the first hammer strike, the assembled audience jumps, but the artist continues her work, methodically picking up the shattered pieces of wood from the floor, sawing the bigger sections with a hack saw. Tiny wisps of dust are visible in the air.

As the destruction continues, there is a pause as Mary Sui Yee Wong strikes a match and holds it up in front of her face. The lit flame in a communal space is immediately riveting, even if small. The implicit threat of calamity hangs in the air. After a few failed attempts to blow out the flame, Wong pulls down her surgical mask to get the job done in one short, sharp breath. The audience relaxes a little.

After this incendiary interlude, it’s back to the regularly scheduled destruction, until what remains of the house is little more than splintered wood and shattered bits. After a short spritz of water, Wong begins to cover the tiny demolition zone in gold leaf, peeling the paper-thin sheets of gleaming metal and applying them with a paint brush, folding them over and around the destroyed model with precision and care. It is mesmerizing to witness. Also strangely calming.

After the performance ends, Wong leads the assembled audience into the Richmond Art Gallery to partake of Restless by Nature: Mary Sui Yee Wong, 1990s to the present in its entirety.

Curator Zoë Chan met Wong when she had just started her first job in Montreal at the MAI, or Montréal, arts interculturels, in the early 2000s.

The story is told in full in Chan’s essay that accompanies the show: “Mary was a member of the MAI’s Visual Arts committee where we were tasked with assessing dozens upon dozens of submissions. It took us the entire day to go through them. We were hungry and tired from plowing through the submissions, fuelled mainly on coffee (and for hardworking director Sylvie Lachance, also on cigarettes).

“But then Mary invited everyone to break for lunch and brought out dumplings that she had made by hand (They were delicious!). This generosity still strikes me today, as words like care and hospitality are theorized, institutionalized, and tossed around casually within today’s art milieux.”

Chan explains that she’d long thought of Wong as a host, but when she had the chance to see Wong’s work in a Zoom meeting, even the tiny images that the artist showed were enough to convince her that a retrospective of her work was necessary, and in fact, long overdue.

Artwork informed by China’s former one-child policy

Restless by Nature takes advantage of the Richmond gallery’s layout to present the work in the most meaningful manner. One example is Blessings, an installation from 1995. The cement steps in one corner of the space are covered in grayish sand, from which sprouts bundles of incense. It is both humble and elegiac — a tribute, or more correctly, a memorial, to the artist’s baby sister.

Wong addresses the impetus of the work in a direct manner, explaining in her writing that accompanies the installation how it came about: “This work commemorates the passing of my sister Ching Yee 靜儀 who was given up for adoption at birth because of the preference for a male heir in my family. Informed by heartache and trauma, Blessings sheds light on the problematic gender bias in Chinese culture that privileges males over females. Sadly, due to China’s one-child policy between 1979 and 2015, 60 per cent of the babies adopted by foreign parents were unwanted girls.”

Although she is currently based in Montréal, Wong grew up in Vancouver after immigrating to Canada with her parents in 1963. Many of her family’s experiences have found their way into her practice.

One example is Cultivating the Land, another installation-based work that incorporates a low wooden fence, a section of coloured rice (precisely shaped into a square) and a large white silk drop cloth that underlies the entirety of the piece, bringing everything together into a greater collective, but also offering up a resonant underlay of tenacity and beauty.

The story behind the work is that when Wong’s parents bought a house in Strathcona in 1969, their immediate neighbours, an Italian family, were less than pleased. The social hierarchy among new immigrants played out as the Italian neighbours were only slightly more established than Wong’s parents, who were part of a wave of recent immigration from Hong Kong.

Despite the lack of welcome, Wong’s mother stood her ground, convincing her husband not to sell the house but to find a better way forward. As Wong recounts, the two families became long-time friends, sharing vegetables, Chinese herbs and a mutual respect and regard. In her words: “It is a story about tolerance and hope in the face of adversity.”

This approach, direct and informed by family history as well as cultural change, gives the work an emotional heft that bridges both past and future, the personal and the political.

In another installation comprised of metal cages, hanging lightbulbs and photographs from the artist’s childhood scattered about the floor refers to the policies of forced immigration from Hong Kong that ensued when the city was returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

Layers of family history intersect and intermingle, with the tectonic plates of larger events embroidering the edges of these social shifts with the raw intimacy of lived experience.

Amidst violence and destruction, gentleness and care

Over the course of her career, Wong has worked in a wide variety of media, from performance to public art works in downtown Montreal. Her work addresses the underlying violence, acts both big and small, that has been perpetrated against the Asian community throughout Canadian history.

Part social commentary and part fashion show, Yellow Apparel (with its tongue-in-cheek title that references yellow peril) came about when Wong discovered a bolt of fabric that featured racist caricatures from different cultures from around the globe. The blandly smiling faces of people from India, China and other nations are relegated to cheerful ciphers, everyone the same shade of ochre.

Wong bought all the material and set about making a series of garments, adopting the marketing tools of the fashion industry. Over the years, different friends and family have taken turns modelling the clothes in a series of performances.

In the Richmond exhibition, artists Paul Wong and Henry Tsang were joined by Emiko Morita in modelling the outfits. Their images grace the walls of the gallery. Their facial expressions are purposefully blank, even slightly pissed off.

But in spite of the passive stares, they still communicate a world of different experiences embodied in the lines, marks and individual characteristics that make up their respective personalities. In the juxtaposition between the ridiculous generic cartoon characters and the real people, a curious dissonance arises. It speaks volumes without saying a single word.

Let’s return, for a moment, to the performance that launched the exhibit. Gold Mountain gives voice to the current moment and historic brutality levelled against the Asian community.

Violence and destruction are certainly evident in the performance, but more meaningful and arguably impactful is the gentleness and care with which the artist rebuilds the obliterated little house, covering the broken shards in delicate gold foil, tucking in the broken bits like putting a series of small children to bed.

It is an act of great healing and transformation, taking what was harsh, even ugly, and remaking it into a thing of beauty. Something to be cherished.

Part of the 2025 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program, Restless by Nature: Mary Sui Yee Wong, 1990s to the present is on view at the Richmond Art Gallery until June 8.