Artist Profile: Angeline Simon

Like the majority of other students in the art program at University of Lethbridge, my undergrad was a period of incubation. While I was able to explore a lot of different art forms, I ended up working primarily with printmaking, photography, and sculpture. Themes including identity, personal cultural heritage, and consumption were always at the forefront of my experiments.

With an interest in consumption, I began working with cheesecloth. By dipping the fabric into a water and glue mixture and then laying the cloth over found plastic objects, I worked to create ghostly shapes that gave the appearance of miniature landforms.

During my undergrad, alongside all of these sculpture/installation pieces, I was also focused on lens-based works. This was a part of a series titled Home (2016), where I merged Alberta landscapes with photographs taken while visiting my relatives in Malaysia. My mother emigrated to Canada in the late 1980s and would take me back to Malaysia to visit our family as often as she could.

Growing up as a biracial, second-generation Canadian—along with being the only child of strict Christian parents (with no relatives in Alberta)—created a large disconnect from my ancestry. Simply put, an identity struggle has always lingered.

In 2016 I told my professor Don Gill how I was going to be travelling to Malaysia to visit my family and a few other countries in Southeast Asia during the Spring Semester for Chinese New Year. I wanted to find a way to continue my studies while abroad, so he agreed to be my advisor for an independent photo arts study. I bought a medium format film camera and a bag full of film and was off on my travels.

Inspired by the American photojournalist Eugene Smith, I was aiming to capture a genuine “glimpse” of each country I visited. I was particularly drawn to street photography at the time. 

After the independent study concluded, I received the Roloff Beny scholarship. This award was established by the Roloff Beny Foundation to provide travel opportunities that complement the creative activity of a student. 

For my project, I travelled to Germany in an attempt to form a relationship with my dad’s home country, and perhaps find a way to better understand the culture and environment that he grew up in. My father emigrated to Canada in the late 1980s, leaving behind his entire family in Germany. The majority of his family passed before I was born, so my connection is very faint to that side of my family.

Using my film camera, I mainly photographed buildings, houses, and street views. In the end I felt as though I didn’t do the project justice, as the photographs felt touristy and lacking. Europe had such a different feeling from my previous travels.

After my trip concluded, I collected a lot of old family photographs from my father. We spent time talking about my grandparents and relatives who, I never had the chance to meet. I started scanning the photographs;  I wanted to try and use them with the images from my travels.

A series of photomontages became the end result of this project. I digitally cut out the figures (my father, grandmother, and grand aunt) and inserted the photographs I took on my trip.

I meditated on the disconnection I had to the figures in each of the photographs. Looking at the faces, I would wonder things such as: “Who were you, what were you really like?”  The resulting work presents a slightly disorienting new composition.

rummaging through the neighbourhood, 2018, 8th Floor Gallery, University of Lethbridge, AB

I was privileged to receive the Gushul Residency award upon graduating and to stay at the Gushul studio for the month of June in 2018. The Gushul Studio and Cottage—situated in the town of Blairmore, Alberta, Canada—opened in 1988 as a site for creative residencies for professional artists and writers. Owned by the University of Lethbridge and managed by the Gushul Residency Program Committee, this facility has hosted over two hundred artists, scholars, and other professionals, and has offered inspiration and sanctuary for the production of their work.

Thomas Gushul, a prolific and pioneering Canadian photographer, founded the studio in Blairmore, where he lived and worked with his wife Lena.

I spent time at the Crowsnest Museum, where I was able to go through archives and photographs taken by Thomas Gushul.

I was interested in the history of Blairmore and used copies of archive images juxtaposed with the photographs I took during my residency. This was my first time utilizing archival images from a museum in my work, and I was really excited to dig into the rich history of the crowsnest pass.

gently passing by, 2019, Passage Gallery, Casa, Lethbridge, AB

In 2019 I had the opportunity to showcase work in the passage gallery at Casa, a community arts centre in downtown Lethbridge. With a continued interest in the history of a community, I got permission from the Galt Museum to go through archive images of downtown Lethbridge buildings. At the same time, I went around photographing current buildings in the downtown core. I wanted to create a little display celebrating Lethbridge, by highlighting the architecture both past and present.

A nice surprise that wasn’t planned was the play with shadow. I bent and positioned a lot of the cutouts to hold a more 3 dimensional space, jutting out towards the viewer.

Later in 2019 I began working on a new body of work, focusing on the photographs my mother passed down to me from her side of the family.

Working with these images was bittersweet for me, as I have a relationship with my Malaysian-Chinese relatives and cherish every opportunity I get to see them. As my grandparents have both passed away, I look back to these photographs continuously wondering what they were like in their younger years.

These are from a 2020 exhibition titled With Warmest Regards Always—a piece of text I found on the back of a portrait of my mother, that she sent back to her parents while living in Penang.

A text written by Adam Whitford from the Southern Alberta Art Gallery reads as follows:

Angeline Simon mines and manipulates her familial photographic archives to explore lateral connections in time and geography. Like any archivist, Simon is responsible for acquiring, arranging, describing, and preserving photographic records that have enduring value. However, she also digitally manipulates, cuts, collages, and merges new and found images to give a voice to the phantoms of displaced family histories. As a second generation Canadian, Simon moves through the river of archival information finding lineal and cross-cultural connections that resonate with anyone who has looked into an ancestral past for answers.

I thought that was a really fitting description of what I’m trying to do.

By utilizing Photoshop’s “Content-Aware Fill” function, I allowed the program’s algorithm to remove selected portions of face and body, covering them with digital information from their surroundings. The result was an uncanny inversion of the figure that seemingly faded alongside what I remembered about them.

Last summer I had the opportunity to exhibit at Harcourt House Artist Run Centre in Edmonton, with support from the Alberta Foundation of the Arts. My partner Adam Whitford curated this exhibition and essentially made it all happen.

I’m interested in playing with more colour and considering ways of adding more themes related to food into my work. Most of my memories of my grandmother and aunties revolve around them asking me if I’ve eaten: a norm instead of asking someone how they are doing.

I’m so grateful that, in 2020, Josie Mills, the Director/Curator of the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, asked if I would be interested in a mentorship opportunity with artist Alana Bartol through her project Processes Of Remediation: Art, Relationships and Nature. This mentorship included an opportunity for an exhibition focusing on social practice.

Social practice is often defined as collaborative, community-driven work that engages with social issues.

Within this mentorship, Alana helped expand my practice from focusing on my identity and personal relationships towards the history of Lethbridge and my interest in Chinatown. We talked about how, since COVID-19, there has been a marked rise in anti-Asian racism: in violence and discrimination against Chinese Canadians. In the absence of a Lethbridge rally to protest this violence, I turned my curiosity to the beginnings of Lethbridge’s Chinese history. With the help of the Galt Museum and Archives, Albert Leong—previous owner of Bow On Tong (a store in Lethbridge’s Chinatown), Belinda Crowson of the Lethbridge Historical Society, and archived newspaper articles—I began collecting photographs and stories that offered a glimpse into our Chinatown.

My own connection to Lethbridge’s Chinatown centres around memories of shopping at Bow On Tong with my mother. My mother often took me shopping at the Asian Supermarket and Bow On Tong for items that she couldn’t easily find at big box stores. I would recall waiting for my mother to finish up her long chats with Albert Leong (the owner of Bow On Tong) and, at the time, not realizing how important it was for her to connect with other Chinese individuals living in Lethbridge.

Through online research, I learned that both Bow on Tong and Kwong on Lung (316 and 318 2 Ave South) were owned by Albert and his family from 1926 until 2021. Both buildings have been designated as provincial historic resources, since they played a vital role in Lethbridge’s formative years. These two buildings served the early Chinese community of Lethbridge, providing them access to a grocery store, restaurant, Chinese herbal medicine shop, and boarding house. What was once a bustling block of Chinese businesses has now died down to an almost-empty, quiet street. 

At the start of my project, I didn’t know what state Bow On Tong was in. I noticed it had been vacant and empty for quite a few years, and in the window of of Bow On Tong were a number of posters.

This poster reads: “Stories Worth Saving and Sharing. The store front and basement of Bow On Tong building will become an interpretive centre to share stories of Lethbridge’s Chinatown, the Chinese Canadian experience in southwestern Alberta and the buildings themselves. Here’s a few stories of some southern Alberta residents while we continue to research and prepare the future interpretive centre.”

Due to structural instability, Albert’s buildings were condemned in 2013. Efforts by multiple groups and organizations had been made to try and save Bow On Tong and Kwong on Lung, but to no avail—they could not raise enough money.

On May 5, 2021, the listing for Bow on Tong and Kwong on Lung (also known as the Maine Opera House and Wing Wah Chong Co.) popped up on my news feed, as my friend’s husband was the realtor. I felt devastated to see the news and wanted to quickly document the buildings before they were sold off. Later that week, I received permission to enter the premises and photograph the interiors. 

I was warned to bring flashlights since there was no electricity in the buildings. It was both an exciting and sad adventure walking through Albert’s buildings. At the time I had no way of contacting him but was glad I was able to experience the shop one last time before it was sold.

On the second floor of Bow On Tong were rows of wooden beams that at one point divided the space into multiple rooms—remnants from its early days as a boarding house for the Chinese community.

As I came across more news articles that Albert would not be returning to his home, and that plans for the interpretive centre seemed to be scrapped, I was even more inspired to create an exhibition on this important part of our community that has long been overlooked.

I wasn’t sure how to reach out to Albert, as I didn’t know any of his friends or family. He wasn’t on Facebook or Instagram! Perhaps it was fate, but more realistically just coincidence—I bumped into him at No Frills in September. I introduced myself and told him how my mother used to take me shopping at his store. We talked about how he had to sell his buildings and how I was planning an exhibition focusing on the history of Lethbridge’s Chinatown. We exchanged phone numbers, and Albert agreed to meet up with me to share his stories and experiences.

We decided to meet up a couple times at the Chinese Freemasons Building, located on the west end of Chinatown, a few buildings down from Bow On Tong. Albert brought me a lot of interesting items to look through, and we talked about his parents.  We talked about how his mother had to isolate in the apartment buildings across the street when she was pregnant due to the belief that pregnant ladies bring bad luck. And yes, a lot of gambling took place in Bow On Tong to pass the time.

We discussed Bylaw 83 that restricted all laundries to this area. The bylaw was only enforced if the laundry was Chinese-owned. Other Chinese-owned businesses followed the laundries into the neighbourhood west of Galt Gardens.

Albert told me how his cat would often climb up the telephone pole and get stuck, and he showed me many beautiful tiny glass containers filled with old medicines that his father used to sell. He told me that he was never interested in getting rich, he just wanted to maintain a store where people could buy unique items and have an opportunity to share his stories of Chinatown. He is a very generous man and would always give a complimentary toy or nicknack to the kids that stopped by. Sometimes school groups would come to his store for a field trip and see all of the treasures inside.

Albert was so kind and gave me a lot of little medicine bottles, a few old Chinese books, and paper containers, all of which are on display in the exhibition.

I started looking online for old newspaper archives from the Lethbridge Herald. I found a lot of disturbing articles, which reflected the social landscape of the early 1900’s in Southern Alberta.

I found it important to include articles on Bylaw 83 and the 1907 Christmas Riot, as both events had an impact on the Chinese community and shaped the development and locations of Chinese owned businesses.

Essentially, the riot started from a rumour that a white cowboy had been killed by a Chinese restaurant worker.

I made multiple appointments at the Galt Museum Archives to spend time looking through various photographs I found of Lethbridge’s Chinatown. Although I didn’t use this image in the exhibition, it really stood out to me, and upon showing it to Albert he told me he was one of the first people to notice the laundry was on fire. This building was located where Nakagama’s food and giftware shop stands today. He told me that, although a fire department was located right across the street, they did not rush to help. The firefighters located on the northside were the first ones on the scene.

I spent a lot of time with these photographs in the archives at the Galt Museum, scanning them into high resolution images allowed me to work with them in different ways. I was able to do some research ahead of time to figure out which photographs I wanted to scan, since many of the archives have been digitized on the Galt’s website.

With permission from the Galt Museum Archives, the scanned images would be used for a photomontage series I wanted to create for my exhibition.

I began manipulating the photographs in different ways, trying to find a way to present them in a new light. Initially, I subtracted parts of the photographs to direct attention to certain aspects of each image.

Eventually, I found these methods were not quite the direction I wanted to go.

Instead of subtracting large portions of the archival photographs, I began situating them inside the photographs I took of Albert’s buildings. Merging these photographs of past and present Chinatown, I hoped viewers would consider the many lives and stories that have touched these places.

These buildings may seem like empty ruins today, but previously, they were a place of refuge. Chinatown could provide sanctuary, comfort, and familiarity for a marginal community in times of prejudice and hardship.

Although much time has passed, this sleepy row of buildings on 2nd Avenue South were once intimate spaces so important to the Chinese community; they deserve to be celebrated and remembered as a fundamental part of our city.

I sourced two political cartoons in this exhibition from the B.C. Saturday Sunset newspaper to paint a picture of the political climate of Western Canada in the early 1900s. Between the cartoons is a Certificate of Chinese Immigration, on loan from the collection of the Galt Museum and Archives—a remnant of the head-tax imposed on all Chinese immigrants from 1885-1923, a period of almost forty years.

Angeline Simon is a multidisciplinary artist from Lethbridge, Alberta. She graduated from the University of Lethbridge in 2018 with a BFA in Art Studio. Influenced by her Malaysian-Chinese and German ancestry, Simon explores familial narratives and the dynamics within contrasting cultures. The physical distance from family members and a lack of participation in both German and Chinese cultural traditions is the main reason for Simon’s investigation into her ancestral past. Inspired by photomontage artists John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch, Simon reflects on her heritage by incorporating similar techniques of collage. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions including Harcourt House Artist Run Centre, Contemporary Calgary, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Casa, Trianon Gallery, and the University of Lethbridge Dr. Foster James Penny Building. [www.angelinesimon.com]

Feature Image: Angeline Simon, Afternoon Stroll, 2017. Photo collage. Courtesy of the artist.

Image description: A forest of white poplar trees is blended with an archival photo of four individuals standing shoulder-to-shoulder and facing toward the camera. The blending of photographs creates the sense of camouflage resulting in the individuals fading into the background image.