Bleached by the Sun is an exhibition that responds to the histories and legacies of Nanaimo’s former Chinatowns through artworks and photographs. Beginning in the 1860s, Nanaimo had a succession of four Chinatowns. The third Chinatown was destroyed by fire in 1960, which had a devastating effect on the community. The exhibition features the viewpoints of three artists who documented Nanaimo’s third Chinatown while it was still standing, and three contemporary artists who respond to Nanaimo’s Chinatowns through sculpture, painting and video, and consider what it means to reflect on these lost sites from the present moment.

The exhibition takes its title, Bleached by the Sun, from a description of Nanaimo’s third Chinatown in Denise Chong’s memoir The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family:

. . . Pavement turned to dirt, and as he crested the hill, Chinatown lay before him. Pine Street ran another two hundred or so feet before it ended in a dead end at the edge of the bluff. The street looked like the set of a western movie. It was lined on either side with unpainted one- and two-story wood-frame buildings, some with false fronts, all with overhanging balconies that sagged and careened. The entire scene was bleached by the sun.

This description is rooted in the fading and incomplete nature of memories, historical documents, and photographs, which are themselves “bleached by the sun”, both fixed and faded. In the exhibition, photographs by Kin Jung and Fred Herzog add to our understanding of Chinatown and the Chinese Canadian community in Nanaimo, but they too have their limits. Herzog’s photos are captivating in their beauty, but are taken from the perspective of someone with a sharp eye who is passing through town. Jung’s images are rooted in community and capture the diverse activities of Chinese Canadians in Chinatown, across the city, and beyond, but like most photographic archives, Jung’s pictures tell a story in fragments. In addition to his photographs of others, Jung himself is depicted partaking in a wide range of jobs and activities, from hauling coal, to working in the darkroom, to having a beer at the seaside. These images speak to Jung’s rich and dynamic life, and his desire to share it on his own terms. Betty Wong‘s watercolour painting depicts Nanaimo’s third Chinatown with the painterly care of an artist who lived there. The watercolour evokes both a softness and an intensity, with a wash of yellow and a blown out sky, it seems to match Denise Chong’s literary description, “bleached by the sun”, perfectly.

Working from a contemporary perspective, Nanaimo born, LA based artist Charlotte Zhang created a video called Pine Street Now and Again (2019) that speaks to the fraught nature of commemoration. It combines restagings, recollections, and playful visual interventions that form a fragmentary and unstable portrait of Nanaimo’s Third Chinatown. Montreal based artist Karen Tam‘s embroidered works on satin depict racially motivated attacks on Asian individuals and communities throughout history. Images such as the remains of Nanaimo’s Chinatown after the fire are depicted on a continuum with acts of vandalism in Chinatowns during the coronavirus pandemic and other recent examples of anti-Asian hate. Jackie Wong, who lives in this region, has created sculptural paintings that reference both gold and coal, and point to the historical, cultural, and economic drivers of Nanaimo’s Chinatowns with poetic grace. Wong has also recently completed a series of public artworks marking Nanaimo’s former Chinatowns through the City of Nanaimo’s Temporary Public Art Program.

These six artists bring forward a wealth of perspectives on Nanaimo’s Chinatowns with the understanding that any memory is incomplete, like a washed out photograph, bleached by the sun.