Critical Writing Index

The Site of Memory

by Larissa Lai

As Public As Race, July 24, 1992, pp. 1-19,24,25

Alberta: Walter Phillips Gallery, 1992

Larissa Lai writes a detailed analysis of Paul Wong's performative video artwork Chinaman's Peak: Walking the Mountain in relation to Chinese cultural rituals and the materiality of the living in relation to the dead. In these works Wong enacts the mnemonic function of Chinese funerary rituals and provides both philosophical and ironic visual explanations for his performances while confronting the underlying history of racism experienced by early Chinese-Canadian miner immigrants. Lai also critically comments on the danger of self-constructed exoticism and Orientalist representation due to the exhibition of vernacular Hong Kong/Chinese subject matter within a Eurocentric context and institution.

ITEM 1992.077 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

Walking the Mountain: Chinaman's PeakPaul Wong