From Venice to Vancouver, Hong Kong artist Tsang Kin-wah spreads words of wisdom

Tsang Kin-wah, who represented Hong Kong at the 56th Venice Biennale last year, is about to make another big artistic statement abroad: a fresco covering the Vancouver Art Gallery’s neoclassical façade.

Vancouverites can expect to see the gallery dominated next spring by Tsang’s deceitfully decorative arrangements of words. Instead of using swear words and quotes from his favourite philosophers, as he has in the past, he plans to look to old newspaper articles on the effect of Hong Kong immigrants on the Canadian city’s house prices in the 1980s and 1990s, and the xenophobia and drawbridge mentality it engendered.

Tsang’s fresco will be in place by March and will coincide with two exhibitions that feature several generations of Canadian artists with a Hong Kong connection. This is the gallery’s way of marking the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty, says Diana Freundl, associate curator of Asian Art at the gallery.

The build-up to the 1997 handover helped transform Vancouver’s predominantly white society into one which today is 18 per cent Chinese. The wave of Hong Kong immigrants that fled there upon the signing in 1984 of the Sino-British Joint Declaration between the British and Chinese governments setting out the terms of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty paved the way for many others from greater China to move to a city where there is a cha chaan teng on every corner. Now, febrile resentment of Chinese investment and immigration has been rekindled by the more recent wave of immigrants from mainland China.

Tsang has no personal ties with Vancouver; in fact, he has never visited the city. But he says he can relate to what has happened given the same concerns in Hong Kong over investment and new immigrants from China.

He was born in Shantou, in Guangdong province, in 1976, and moved to Hong Kong when he was a child. He grew up feeling he was on the wrong side of an us-and-them divide. Later, he felt he didn’t fit in again when he was studying for a master’s degree in London. He has always cited a sense of alienation and quitting Christianity as a teenager as experiences that inform his art.