Vtape presents
OMG, it’s a Party!
Curated by Call Again (Henry Heng Lu + Winnie Wu)
September 28, 2018
Doors at 6:30 pm, Screening at 7:00 pm, Slow Dance Party at 8 pm
Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space
4th floor @401 Richmond St. W., suite 452
Winston Xin
Boulevard of Broken Sync, 1996, 03:00
Lesley Loksi Chan
Make a decent meal, Lesley, 2005, 02:50
Gordon Wong
Star Trek Generation Spice, 1998, 05:00
Star Trek Disco Generation, 1997, 05:00
Paul Wong
Prime Cuts, 1981, 20:00
Yau Ching
June 30, 1997 (AKA Celebrate What?), 1997, 07:30
Call Again writes: “Vtape has quite a list of video works by artists of Chinese descent in their collection. However, most of works are not screened publicly regularly. A lot of these works are specific to the contexts in which they were created. We hope our screening can shed some light on these works and investigate how they may now be interpreted in a different way. The works selected reflect on ideas associated with the queering of western pop culture, identity searching, gender dynamics, and Chinese politics. If the physical OMG exhibition showcases our investigation of “party”, the Screening is perhaps trying to tell you why we do this exploring, posing it as an echo of the exhibition.”
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Henry Heng Lu (with Winnie Wu in Beijing) writes: “The Party is to celebrate the end of the exhibition and an attempt to redefine a celebration of this kind. Both Winnie and I certainly have various interests embedded in the gigantic backdrop of creative ideals. Raised in an environment infiltrated with rather singular political thoughts and homogenous cultural habits, living in Canada has diluted our highly pre-influenced view of the west while having it diversified.
We listen to Billboard Hot 100 songs when we are driving out of town for a weekend getaway, but we also listen to Cantonese ballads while texting our (ex-)lovers on a rainy day.
We dance to heavily-sampled 90s R&B when we are at a friend’s hormone-filled birthday party, but we also karaoke cheesy 2000s Mandarin breakup songs with people who look like us.
We talk care-free (sometimes even street) with hard liquor in our hands to strangers in an EDM dance club, but we also share our career goals and (non-existing) love lives with family friends at a dim sum restaurant on a Sunday morning.
We sit ourselves by a symphony orchestra looking fancy and slightly tipsy after a few merely diplomatic handshakes with people from work, but we also walk home discussing passionately the Mandarin-speaking romantic comedy that we just watched at Cineplex where subtitles were totally unnecessary for us.
We go to classes where we are taught who H. P. Lovecraft, Jack Layton and Claire Bishop are and denounce Donald Trump, but we also read Chinese communist party propaganda and fake news that our relatives in China send us on WeChat and pictures of kids of our elementary schoolmates.
This living in between two vastly different political/cultural machines has led us to get to a mental place where we can (at least attempt to) seamlessly travel between social protocols and situations of the said binaristic systems.
The Slow Dance Party, opposite to a regular dance party as usually expected, will bring together the observations, influences, and their discontents we’ve got so far in this living-in-between process in a celebratory setting. It seeks to put forward the discomfort, absurdity, awkwardness and determination coming out of it. And then, we celebrate them.”