Laiwan at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
The language of printmaking – traces, erasures, resists – embody the process of its transference of template onto surface. Resists separate designs from their environment of negative space, ensuring the integrity of the artist’s creation. Solvents erase the excess to reveal the faint traces of the artistic intervention, a spectre persisting through each reproductive iteration.
These words are imbued with an additional layer of meaning through the print and lens-based media works of the artist Laiwan. Residing in both Zimbabwe and Canada, Laiwan has been an integral part of the Vancouver arts community since the early 1980s, founding the artist-run centre Or Gallery in 1983 as well as having a continued contribution to local visual art print publications and activist collectives. Her practice reflects the multifaceted nature of her experience, as an ethnic Chinese born and raised in the former British colony of Rhodesia in southern Africa, who later emigrated to Canada in her late teens.
Her work explores the experience of the marginalized in relation to the constant through an investigation of the political and societal structures built through vocabularies of language and media. Her various experimentations with text and image show how expression is perceived and communicated differently across language and images. Her poetic verses, some composed, some selected to be critically re-examined, enact daydream-like reveries of her desire for home through the experience of dislocation. Through her various interventions into language and text, the hidden structures of grammar and syntax are brought to the fore, highlighting the alienated experience of living through a foreign language.
The space at the Belkin is intimate and dimly lit, facilitating an atmosphere that invites the viewer to a more meditative encounter with the works. The grainy materiality of the projected image, the rhythmic, mechanical clicking of the early film projector, and the yellowed fraying edges of the paper all contribute to a sense of aged familiarity and warmth. While texts line the wall, they resist being classified through their refusal to reveal themselves completely. Fragments of words and phrases brought in comparison with images enact a forceful collision that betrays the prejudices of our subconscious.
subject to another’s language, another’s syntax
subject to ridicule
division by Intelligence
The works unveil the way in which our experience is shaped through the grammars of the languages we use and are used by, and how similarly that languages also shape how we are perceived by others. Her works convey the sentiment characterized by the immigrant experience, of the frustration associated with the inability to fully express oneself, of the infantilization that inevitably occurs towards someone speaking in a foreign tongue, of feeling as if one has an entirely different personality in another language. Breaking free from a model of language as limiting, Laiwan instead suggests a mode of language that is multiple and fluid, loosened from the rigid constraints of syntax that define a language user as educated or intelligent. Her use of erasure and redacting as concealment explores the latent potential of being a trace, resisting exclusion by the quality of being blurred and indistinct, persisting through as remnants against complete erasure. Through her work, Laiwan asks what role does language play in being perceived and communicated, and how does syntax form as a structural barrier that keeps us within its definition of educated or literate? Laiwan’s interventions using dictionaries further highlight the discordance present in the process of translation from one language and culture to another.
Laiwan’s work in image and text also speak to the constant evolution of identities across geographic space. Her works dismantle the association of identity with place, to imagine an identity without the demarcation of borders. In contrast to the postmodern and postcolonial model of globalization, which she views as perpetuating a model of “different-from-constant” inherently epistemologically shaped by dominant western values, Laiwan proposes a model of “different-as-constant,” where differences within the category of “difference” have the space to emerge. In one of her works involving writing over and atop itself until it becomes an image, she visually employs the language of conceptualism to engage with questions of sexuality, gender, and race, queering the way in which the language is typically used and suggesting a method by which “difference-as-constant” can be understood.
On the contrary, the current art world is still very much shaped by the idea that the marginalized are defined by their difference in identity from the constant. The showing at this year’s Venice Biennale, while a commendable feat of representation, can be said to still be formulated within the dominant framework of western values. Pavilions are still divided by nation-state, reducing each selection to be representative of an identity belonging to a geographic location. At the same time, the main exhibition ‘The Milk of Dreams’ pushes the impression of a globalized art world with a roster of culturally diverse and predominantly female artists suggests the irony ever-present when considering that the transactions occurring in Venice as a result of the fair are still mostly comprised of blue-chip white male artists.
Signifiers of race, gender, sexuality, class, linguistics and location create false sensibilities of community that serve not the community itself but rather the structure that defies individuals by it. Laiwan’s work calls for an awareness towards the sociopolitical constructions that limit diversity and to practice identity as multiple and geographically varied. Rather than tokenizing difference to fill in the gaps left by the dominant ideology, the structure must abandon the authority to determine the qualifying conditions. If the Biennale is anything to go by, they have presented female BIPOC artists with great fanfare but continue to maintain the status quo wherever it concerns their financial benefit. However, if not a presence-based solution to the problem of lack of representation, how might a model of the non-colonial, where power is shared in terms of the nearby rather than of a heat map of center and periphery, look like? While not the most effective method, it might be considered that the line up in Venice is a step forward in terms of allowing more presence for underrepresented artists to reclaim and reshape their place on the map.
Laiwan: Traces, Erasures, and Resists was on view at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery from January 7 to April 10, 2022.