More than a Glimpse: Looking with Care at Chinatown in Lethbridge

To question how spaces came to be, and to trace what they produce, as well as what produces them, is to unsettle familiar everyday notions. [Sherene Razack]¹

Angeline Simon’s A Glimpse into Chinatown was presented this year at the Helen Christou Gallery, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery’s satellite exhibition space, part of the main pedestrian route at the intersection of the Centre for the Arts and the University Library. Entering the hallway gallery, one is met with a series of artworks that cleverly merge past and present, drawing viewers into Lethbridge’s Chinatown through photography, archival articles, images, and documents, as well as objects from the Bow On Tong, one of the last remaining historic buildings in Chinatown.

At the southwest end of the hall is a floor-to-ceiling mural of a historical photograph of the Kwong On Lung (also known as Wing Wah Chong Co.) and the Bow On Tong, two buildings that have come to represent Lethbridge’s historic Chinese neighbourhood. (Lethbridge’s Chinatown is one of Alberta’s oldest and once spanned a nine-block area). Despite being designated historic buildings by the City of Lethbridge and the Province of Alberta, the buildings were sold in 2021 while Simon was developing this body of work. Wheat-pasted directly on the wall, the sepia-toned photograph, sourced from the Galt Museum and Archives, has a nostalgic air, recalling museum displays of another time. Framed by two columns with staircases on either side, passersby become implicated in the story of Chinatown as they move through the corridors as if walking by these buildings on the street. This is not a story of a past long gone, but one that lives on in the present.

A form of street art, wheat-pasting is a type of direct action—an intervention into public space. It can disrupt the everyday and reach audiences in the wider public sphere. By claiming space for Lethbridge’s Chinatown directly on the hallway walls, Simon brings what is vanishing into view, drawing parallels between the interstitial space of the corridor and the development and decline of Chinatown.

Since COVID-19, there has been a marked rise in Anti-Asian racism, violence, and discrimination against Chinese Canadians. Members of the Asian community and their allies have held protests across what is colonially called Canada, including in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton) and Mohkínstsis (Calgary), to raise awareness and call for action. Meaningful change, though, can feel elusive in Alberta, where, earlier this year, outgoing Premier Jason Kenney felt comfortable making anti-Asian racist comments during an interview. In her artist statement, Simon notes that the absence of such protests in Lethbridge compelled her to look more deeply into the Chinese community where she has lived for almost twenty years.

Though places of culture, safety, and community, Chinatowns can also be viewed as the result of racist laws that underpin the myths of white settler Canadian society, restricting the movement, settlement, and livelihoods of Chinese people. Legal scholar Catherine Chow writes, “Chinatown’s landscape has a dual personality as space constructed by Chinese Canadians for themselves and as a social construct of Chineseness for and by a white settler society.”² Simon’s careful curation of articles, images, and artifacts remind us that the people who created Chinatowns and found safety within them did and do so as acts of resistance in the face of violence, racism, and exclusion.

In the centre of the hallway below the exhibition title sits a framed Chinese Head Tax certificate entitled Certificate of Chinese Immigration – Jung Sew Soon, on loan from the Galt Archives. Surrounding it are two 1907 editorial cartoons from The British Columbia Saturday Sunset that demonstrate support for the Chinese Head Tax, a racist tool of Canada’s exclusionary immigration policies. Newspaper articles from the Lethbridge Herald (1908, 1910) and the New York Times (1907), draw attention to the violence and exclusion of Chinese people in Lethbridge. “Area for Chinese Laundries Defined” gives an account of Bylaw 83, which restricted Chinese laundries to the “Segregated Area” later known as Chinatown.

Two articles, “Lethbridge Mobs Chinese” and “Vented Wrath on Chinamen,” report the Christmas Riot of 1907, detailing whitewashed stories of a racist white mob that violently attacked Chinese businesses and people in Lethbridge based on a false rumour that a white man had been murdered. The race riot garnered international coverage. In Simon’s work, each full newspaper page is overlaid with frosted mylar, obscuring but not concealing what lies beneath. Cut-outs in the mylar direct the viewer’s attention to the articles, compelling audiences to read while drawing attention to the ways in which history is framed and presented. How easy is it to overlook these aspects of the City’s past and how they impact the present in both distinct and less obvious ways?

A Glimpse Into Chinatown was commissioned by the University of Lethbridge aspart of a mentorship through Processes of Remediation: art, relationships, nature, a project with the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery that began in the summer of 2020, curated by Josephine Mills. As Angeline’s mentor, we had conversations about the desire to work with and in community, and the difficulties of doing so during the pandemic. We talked about the history and present state of Lethbridge’s Chinatown; the complications of archival research; the difficulty of finding documentation and information about Chinatown and its residents; and the possibility of conjuring awareness and history when gaps and questions remain.

During a letter exchange, Angeline sent me a collection of small printouts of her recent work. In her letter, she expressed the urgency she felt to address “the constant thought of being biracial”³ in her work. Simon is a second-generation Canadian of Chinese-Malaysian and German ancestry, and she often draws on her family’s photographic archive as material for her work. By scanning, digitally manipulating, cutting, and collaging the images, she creates artworks that bridge temporal, geographic, cultural, and ancestral connections. The images ask for slow, considered looking. In searching for what’s missing, I become attuned to the processes of manipulating information and images, and the role photography plays in the construction of memory, whether it be familial, communal, or individual.

In Simon’s work, each full newspaper page is overlaid with frosted mylar, obscuring but not concealing what lies beneath. Cut-outs in the mylar direct the viewer’s attention to the articles, compelling audiences to read while drawing attention to the ways in which history is framed and presented. How easy is it to overlook these aspects of the City’s past and how they impact the present in both distinct and less obvious ways?

Simon’s work on Lethbridge’s Chinatown is not only timely in a local context but also across the country, as many artists and curators examine, honour, and contribute to broader national conversations about Chinatowns. (This work is also in conversation with the deep process of rethinking and reconsidering the very origins of so-called Canada.). For example, Whose Chinatown? Examining Chinatown Gazes in Art, Archives, and Collections (2021), curated by Karen Tam for Griffin Art Projects (Vancouver), sought to examine “how narratives are constructed around the idea of Chinatown and the colonial notions that underwrite some of these relations.”⁴ The exhibition featured over 159 pieces by twenty-nine artists. Like Simon, many of the artists in Whose Chinatown, utilized public, familial, and private archives to illustrate the ways in which Chinatowns can be recognized, valued, and sustained as centres of communities.

Photographs of Chinatowns often present the architecture, focusing on street views and building exteriors. Curator Karen Tam speaks about the dangers of focusing only on the outer views of Chinatowns, particularly depictions by non-Chinese people that exotify Chinatown, “basically just showing the exterior and that it’s an exotic locale.”⁵ In her exhibition, Tam’s approach is to contrast these depictions with photographs by artists like Jim Wong-Chu who were involved with the Chinese communities they documented. Tam also points to the lack of documentation by the residents themselves: “It shouldn’t be surprising, but it is surprising, to find that there’s not a lot of materials [of] early depictions of Chinatowns and Chinese residents and that there were hardly any by Chinese Canadians.”⁶ She goes on to say that such images exist and that the work of finding them “needs to be done.”

Simon is one of the many artists taking up this work. Simons’ photomontages reveal complexity and depth behind the exterior, merging older and newer images, and ones that capture residents behind the walls. Black-and-white historical photographs  of some of the Chinatown residents—sourced from the Galt Museum and Archives—merge with full-colour photographs that Simon has taken of the interiors and exteriors of two of the remaining buildings of Chinatown. In this elegiac series, images from the past unsettle the cultural erasure of the present, humanizing a community whose destruction has been taken for granted and overlooked.

Simon’s works, each without an individual title, collapse past and present, bringing the same reflective quality to the work that she does when working with her family photographs. Instead of employing techniques of erasure, she presents the people that worked, lived, and frequented these spaces in full view. Facial expressions, gestures, and body language bring emotional resonance to moments of everyday life. As the title foreshadows, the audience can get a ‘glimpse’ of the people who built, lived, gathered, sustained, and breathed life into these vital community spaces.

One of the photomontages includes a photograph Simon took from the inside of the main floor of the Bow On Tong. The space is largely empty with signs of packing up and moving all around: boxes, plastic bins, a dolly. Boards and plastic cover windows. The interior lights are off. Natural light makes its way in through the storefront windows that remain uncovered. The image is then layered with a historical black-and-white photograph of the same space; in it, a man measures out medicine on a scale. His eyes downcast, he concentrates on the task at hand. Boxes, bottles, and vases labelled with Chinese characters are in the foreground and line the shelves in the background. Some of the edges of the photograph are visible, along with its accession number.

Shown alongside the photographs, in a museum vitrine, is a collection of objects from the Bow On Tong gifted to the artist by Albert Leong. Leong’s family established Bow On Tong and Kwong On Lung almost one hundred years ago. The building served many functions for the community over the years, including an apothecary, Chinese goods store, lodging, and home to the Leong family. The items that came from the apothecary are now artifacts on display. A book, which is open to pages with Chinese characters and an illustration of a plant, is displayed alongside Chinese herbal medicines in bottles and boxes of their original packaging. One of the packages has been opened, a cracked wax ball partially revealing its contents. As Simon explains in her statement, Albert’s father sold Chinese medicine.⁷ In conversation, Angeline said she felt a responsibility to portray the history and these stories, to give back to the community that she is part of. In her hands, this medicine becomes art that makes space for histories, care, and processes of healing.

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Alana Bartol is an artist based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary, AB) in Treaty 7 Territory [www.alanabartol.com].

1. Sherene H. Razack, “When Place Becomes Race,” in Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, ed. Sherene H. Razack (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), 7.
2. Catherine W. Chow, “Chinatown Geographies and the Politics of Race, Space and the Law.” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2007), 11.
3. Angeline Simon to Alana Bartol, September, 2020.
4. Karen Tam. “Whose Chinatown? Examining Chinatown Gazes in Art, Archives, and Collections.” Griffin Art Projects, 2021, Accessed May 3, 2022.
5. “Curator’s Tour with Karen Tam.” YouTube video, 54:11, “Griffin Art Projects”, February 17, 2021, 42:10-42:31.
6. “Curator’s Tour with Karen Tam,” 34:47-44:11.
7. Angeline Simon, “Artist Statement – A Glimpse into Chinatown.” University of Lethbridge Helen Christou Gallery, 2022.