July 1st, 2023 marked the centenary of the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act, 100 years to the very day that the Act—also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act—went into effect in what is colonially known as “Canada.” In Vancouver’s Chinatown, there was a deliberate refusal to celebrate Dominion Day, led by the Committee for July 1 Humiliation to Overseas Chinese. July 1st thus became known instead as “Humiliation Day” for many years.
Chinese communities from sea to sea were deeply harmed by this racist legislation that enforced a near-total ban of immigration by anyone of Chinese origin or descent to Canada. All Chinese people residing within the country or aiming to enter had to register with the Department of Immigration and Colonization and carry an identification certificate—part of the Chinese Immigration or C.I. system—that tracked and controlled individuals’ movements in and out of, and within, the nation state.
This body of work explores the period leading up to, during, and beyond the Exclusion Era years (1923-1947) in Vancouver, British Columbia, and across the country. Through a deep exploration and creative research of multiple archives of historical materials, the artworks uncover what conditions were like for the Chinese diasporic community while also tying it to present-day issues of settler-colonialism, white supremacy, and racial capitalism. Using archival materials in this work is meant to subvert the very colonial collections they are drawn from.
With diminishment and without splendour
Digital collage
20 in x 24 in
2023
Image Source (used with permission): Poster on Chinese immigration, 1923, Library and Archives Canada/Chinese (Nationalist) Consular records/e010833850
Detail of found poem:
Saffron coloured sons
Lightjet print (of Chinese queue wigs, ginkgo leaves from artist’s tree)
24 in x 36 in
2023-24
The creation of Saffron coloured sons was directly inspired by a black-and-white drawing housed in the British Columbia Archives — its title is “From Maclean’s Magazine, 7 May 1960, ‘Chinese – Vancouver” and it is classified as simply “Art” and “Chinese.” Depicted are two Chinese labourers with the ends of their queue braids tied together as they drown; armed men standing over them.
This jarring image stayed with me for months. Eventually, I uncovered a digitized copy of Maclean’s (the page is reproduced here with permission courtesy of Maclean’s Magazine). The drawing accompanied a column recounting Vancouver’s first race riot in Coal Harbour on 24 February, 1887.
Maclean’s article reproduced with permission.
If only (I would already have)
Digital collage
12.25 in x 8.5 in
2023
Image source (used with permission): Harold Smith photo, Vancouver Public Library 18505
The above photo — from 1911, of Chinese labourers sleeping — is overlaid with selected lines from a translated poem. This poem was found etched into a wall by a detained Chinese migrant at the Federal Immigration Detention Hospital in Victoria, BC, some time between 1909-1923. The wall fragment is held at the Royal BC Museum (screen capture from their website on left).
The poem reads: “Driven by poverty I sailed over here on the choppy sea. If only I did not need to labour for money, I would already have returned home to China.” (unknown translator)
Prohibited Classes Palimpsest
Digital collage
20 in x 24 in
2024/2026
Image Source (text; used with permission): Library and Archives Canada/Department of Employment and Immigration fonds/RG76-I-A-1 file 827821, Chinese Immigration Act, 1923 © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of Library and Archives Canada (2023).
Image Source (background photo; used with permission): Philip Timms photo, Vancouver Public Library 940
Using text directly from the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act, this artwork focuses on the “Prohibited Classes” section, which named groups of Chinese people excluded from entering or landing in so-called “Canada until The Act’s repeal in 1947. This included “persons addicted to drugs,” “of psychopathic inferiority,” or “those living on the avails of prostitution.” In the historical context of Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside, the same forces that gave rise to the Chinese Exclusion Act are the same ones that have led to ongoing, present-day white supremacist violence, the militarization of police and reliance on carceral systems, and state neglect in the drug poisoning crisis.
These drug laws are the same ones that persecuted the Chinese community in Vancouver through the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the 1908 Opium Act was Canada’s first drug legislation and forms the basis of Canada’s modern day drug laws. The Opium Act was born out of the 1907 Anti-Asian race riots in Vancouver when then-Deputy Minister of Labour William Lyon Mackenzie King investigated property damage affecting Japanese and Chinese merchants and discovered that opium was being legally manufactured, regulated and used by the local Chinese population. The accompanying photograph depicts some of the boarded-up businesses post-riots.
Gold Mountain and the Department of Immigration and Colonization
Digital collage
40 in x 36 in
2026
Image Sources (used with permission): Charles Macmunn photo, Vancouver Public Library 219; University of British Columbia Library Digitization Centre and its generous donors <https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0367360>.
This piece features an 1885 photograph of Secwépemc and Chinese individuals depicted in front of a cleared landscape near Keefers, BC during the Canadian Pacific Railway’s construction, with the tree stumps and blasted rocks bearing witness to colonial violence and ideas of ‘progress’ and technological development. The image is overlaid with the reverse of an immigration certificate that individuals of Chinese descent were legislated to carry since the late 1800s. The movements of the Chinese population were controlled and certificates were required to prove individuals’ legitimacy in the country, and that they had paid the head tax.
Within nation building and the settler-colonialism project in so-called Canada, legislated Acts such as the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act or the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 (long title: An Act to encourage the gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in this Province, and to amend the Laws relating to Indians)—a precursor to the 1876 Indian Act—governed the lives of Indigenous and non-white settlers in service of a White Dominion. Today, ideologies from this supposed-bygone era still permeate during these fascistic times as we witness the precarity and loss of migrants rights, for one.
In the original photograph of the landscape, the central figure of the white prospector—whose name is known in the archival record—has been cropped out, with only his leg and boot still vaguely visible in the middle of the image which has been mirrored and flipped. The deep creases of the certificate are evident in the overlaid image as the certificate holder would have carried the folded copy with them at all times.
The series title draws on the imperialist idea that the British Empire and other ancient Empires held that “the sun will never set” on their territories; that the sun would always be shining on at least one part of their conquered lands. British Columbia’s provincial Coat of Arms refers to this in its motto (“Splendour Without Diminishment”), with an image of the sun on its shield — both emblems that the province employs to reinforce its sovereignty over its lands and peoples. I wanted to subvert this, stating that the sun will inevitably set and we cannot pretend otherwise or control it, to draw on my family’s practice of Zen Buddhism and its value of ephemerality and impermanence.
My project recognizes the limitations and consequences of working with archives created within a colonial context, encompassing visual and textual examples of prejudices, biases, and hateful rhetoric directed not just at the Chinese community, but also towards Indigenous, Black, and other racialized peoples. Over the years, I have combed through thousands of archival records and encountering these harsh entries within colonial archives—collections that “emerged from a colonial impulse: a singular, white man’s joy,” as Cree-Métis writer and librarian Jessie Loyer writes—has been difficult. As art historian/curator Temi Odumosu asks, “how can we extend concepts of caretaking and custodianship beyond institutions toward reparative strategies proposed by artists, activists, and other agents of change?” This project seeks to ensure that the function of remembering is done with an ethics of care and integrity in order to restore agency and benevolence to the Chinese community of which I am a part of.