We’re proud to launch our new home with a poster art series by artist Kwoi Gin. Longing Belonging Redux is a vivid, powerful assemblage of tableaux vivant dealing with unarchived history. The exhibition is on view July 17 to 31, 2024 at the Lab’s new PlaySpace at 707 Dundas St West.

“My father came under the guise of PaperSon,” writes Kwoi, during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act when Canada denied Chinese people from immigrating on the basis of race, after using tens of thousands of Chinese labourers to build the railway that created Canada. (On land stolen from Indigenous people. For more detailed analysis, see here.)

The doorway to Kwoi’s Longing Belonging Redux exhibition presents a precious hand-coloured family portrait taken in the days before his father left his new wife, his mother and his sister to live in Canada with “a 金山 Great Grandpa he had never met.”

“No one told him it was going to be years of loneliness, racism, separation, back-breaking toil,” writes Kwoi, nor that he would not get to see his son (Kwoi) grow up… “No one told ma she married into a 金山 family only to be an absentee wife and her husband wont be the same man she met and fell in love with on that 9-Man Court when she finally reunites with him decades after Amnesty. The Chinese Exclusion fine print didn’t warn him ‘Gold Mountain was reserved for Whites only’.”

Telling stories with significant objects at meaning-laden sites is a practice that Kwoi began decades ago in art school, influenced by his mentors Barb Astman and Suzy Lake.

Conceptualized and composed by Kwoi, photographed by Maylynn Quan and Pushpa Acharya, the images in Longing Belonging Redux are part of Kwoi’s ongoing work as a founding member of the Long Time No See Collective, led by Brenda Joy Lem and Rick Wong. In his creative research at the Lab, Kwoi will continue to explore memory, archives, objects, and tableaux.

Visits with the artist available by ​email appointment​. Buy him a coffee (or lunch!) at Market 707 for the best, juiciest stories.