Don’t Look Back in Anger (2024) Steven Dragonn. Lightbox Photography. 110.5 x 128.5 x 8 in
CICA Vancouver presents Reverse Chinatown in collaboration with DeCA (Dawn Eleven Contemporary Art Foundation), a group exhibition bringing together artists from Vancouver and New York to reconsider what “Chinatown” has meant historically, and what it might become.
Featuring work by Bagua Artist Association, Steven Dragonn, Jenie Gao, Irfan Hendrian, Karis Wong, James Lee Chiahan, Xiangmei Su, Janet Wang & Gabe Wong, Guangyuan (Sam) Xing & Fangshi (Diego) Qi, and Shengtian Zheng. The exhibition examines Chinatown not as a singular cultural identity, but as an evolving shaped by migration, policy, memory, and imagination.
Seen from afar, Chinatowns in different cities are constantly perceived parallel, with recognizable streetscapes connected by a shared diaspora. Yet each is formed through distinct histories, migrations, and everyday encounters. In Vancouver, Chinatown developed within clearly defined boundaries that still shape how the neighbourhood is perceived today. In New York, it grew through layers of arrivals, improvisations, and overlapping communities. By placing artists from both cities in dialogue, Reverse Chinatown questions the assumption that Chinatown represents a coherent or unified cultural category, and asks how cultural spaces evolve across generations, and how people find belonging within places that are constantly changing.
Rather than presenting Chinatown as a fixed enclave or nostalgic symbol, the exhibition approaches it as a process, continually reshaped by movement, encounter, and reinterpretation. Through painting, installation, olfactory experience, and collaborative practices, the artists reflect on translation, belonging, visibility, and the gap between how a place is imagined and how it is lived.
Reverse Chinatown invites visitors to slow down and look carefully at familiar forms, and to consider how cultural landscapes are built not only by architecture or heritage, but by the people who move through them over time.
About the Artists
Bagua Artist Association
Bagua Artist Association is a two-person artist collective founded in 2018, consisting of Katharine Meng-Yuan Yi and Sean Cao. Yi holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia, and Cao holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Rooted in migration and deeply embedded in Vancouver’s Chinatown, the collective’s multidisciplinary practice integrates lens-based approaches within a research-driven and socially engaged framework. Their name, Bagua 八卦 – a double entendre that invokes both the ancestral cosmological trigrams of Chinese divination and modern slang for gossip – encapsulates their interest in cultural traditions and expressions, folk art, pop media, social phenomena, and the everyday.
Steven Dragonn
Steven Dragonn is a Vancouver-based visual artist and curator. Steven Dragonn is a Vancouver-based visual artist and curator. His artistic practice is informed by Conceptualism and Neo-Hyperreal Pictorialism. Dragonn’s work also draws upon Communicatics theory and personal experience. His curatorial interests include individual experience, immigration of minorities, identities, social and political concerns.His practice involves a wide range of forms, including photography, video, sculpture and new media art such as immersive installation, video installation, image-sculpture and digital art.
He currently works as an Independent Curator and Multimedia Artist in both Vancouver, Canada and Guangzhou, China. He is the founder of Canton-sardine, an artist and curator driven contemporary art space established in 2018 in Vancouver, Canada, which has widely showcased national and international acclaimed artists/collectives include: Jeff Wall, Marian Penner Bancroft, Image Bank (Michael Morris & Vincent Trasov), Paul Wong, Gu Xiong, Wang Qingsong, Zhang Peili, Polit-Sheer-Form-Office, Wang Guofeng, Miao Xiaochun, Weng Fen and O Zhang. To date, his curatorial exhibitions have been included seven times in Capture Photography Festival’s Selected Exhibition Program, earning the Printing Prize in 2021 for Wang Qingsong’s solo exhibition.
Jenie Gao
Jenie Gao (they/she) is a full-time artist, creative director, and entrepreneur. They run an anti-gentrification arts business, specializing in printmaking, public art, social practice, and community storytelling. They consult for cultural organizations and the public sector on equity and ethics.
Jenie pulls from personal and professional experiences as a second generation Taiwanese-Chinese American, queer woman of color, and descendant of working class immigrants. Prior to founding their business, Jenie worked in the museum industry, public education, and manufacturing sectors. Through their cross section of experiences, Jenie has become attuned to issues of artists’ labor, cultural power, and institutional accountability. They run a paid apprenticeship program and have thus far mentored 25 emerging artists.
Jenie has a BFA in Printmaking/Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Their work is in 40 institutional collections including Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Princeton University, Cornell University, Stanford University, and the Library of Congress. Their recent exhibits include Museum of Wisconsin Art, Trout Museum of Art, Burnaby Village Museum, Cedarburg Museum, and South Bend Museum of Art. Their work has been included in publications such as PBS, Shoutout LA, and Fête Chinoise. Their art residencies include Women’s Studio Workshop in Kingston, New York; Art in the Park with Vancouver Board of Parks & Recreation: Decolonization, Art, & Culture; Ma’s House in the Shinnecock Reservation in Southampton, New York; Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in Okoboji, Iowa; the Bubbler at Madison Public Library in Madison, Wisconsin; Artist Campaign School in Chicago, Illinois; Proyecto’ace in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Museo de Arte Moderno in Chile. They are a TEDx Madison speaker and gave a talk entitled “The Power and Purpose of Creativity.”
Jenie Gao is the recently appointed Executive Director of Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. They live on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and are also based in Teejop (Madison, Wisconsin) on the lands of the Ho-Chunk peoples.
Irfan Hendrian
IRFAN HENDRIAN (b.Ohio, 1987) is an artist, industrial printmaker and graphic designer known for his formal explorations in abstraction. Working mainly with paper, his interest is in the Bauhaus approach and method: to reduce, subtract and simplify everything to its most sublime, essential and substantial state.
Hendrian values efficient, logical and utilitarian modes of thinking and acting which are reflected directly in his work. Collage provides methodology that maintains Hendrian’s purist approach to materials, utilizing paper as a raw material with sculptural capabilities. Rather than creating images, he believes that through composing visual arrangement of objects, a particular aesthetic value emerges.
Karis Huang
Karis Wong (Baoyi Huang, b. 1998, Shenzhen) is a New York–based artist working primarily in oil painting, where desire, intimacy, and commodity imagery blur into one surreal surface. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently pursuing an MFA at Parsons School of Design. Her work draws from personal photographs, online images, and objects encountered in her daily movements through the city—souvenirs of dislocation, melancholy, and temporary fantasies.
James Lee Chiahan
James Lee Chiahan is a self-taught Taiwanese-Canadian artist based in Montreal. His work has been commissioned in editorial and commercial contexts for clients like Apple, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Walrus. His work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators and American Illustration.
In recent years, he has created several murals in both public and private settings. His work is held in private collections around the world and has been exhibited in Canada and the United States.
Xiangmei Su
Xiangmei Su (b. China) is a Vancouver-based visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans installation, photography, video, painting, and drawing. Her work explores themes of cultural identity, memory, and belonging through materials that bridge personal history and collective experience. A graduate of the University of British Columbia’s Visual Arts program, Su has exhibited widely across Canada and China, with recent solo exhibitions at Canton Sardine (2024), Lipont Art Gallery (2023), and Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden (2022).
Janet Wang & Gabe Wong
Janet Wang is a visual artist and educator working within a traditional painting and drawing practice, integrated with sculptural installation practices and digital media. A second-generation settler of Chinese heritage, she is based in Vancouver, Canada, the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Her work has been supported by the British Columbia Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and the artist was named the RBC Emerging Artist through the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2024. The artist received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia and her Master of Arts in Studio Practice from the University of Leeds in England. She is an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean, Foundation, at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
Guangyuan (Sam) Xing & Fangshi (Diego) Qi
Guangyuan （Sam） Xing （邢广运） is a interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Xing’s practice explores the entanglements of memory, emotion, space, and abstraction. His process-driven work often employs erasure, and performative gestures to express themes of nostalgia and emotional distance, blending Eastern materials with contemporary conceptual strategies. His recent exhibitions include the Emerging artist & Mid-career artist award (Vancouver), 2025 Chengdu Biennale (LY MoMA), Re:Turning (New York), Turn Off Personalized Recommendations (South Visual Arts Museum, Nanjing), and public art initiatives such as Art History 101: A Brush With Fashion and Barkitecture on Madison Avenue. His photography has been featured on the Vogue Italia’s Photo Vogue.
Diego Qi‘s art grows from Northeast China—a land of snow, black soil, and old heavy industry. He treats “superstition” as the region’s true folk language. It is not ignorance.It is the plain wisdom his elders used to build order, carry feelings, and hold families together through harsh nature and huge historical shocks.
These odd rules and rituals are cultural tools shaped by local history, geography. and economy. They quietly train and protect family bonds. Diego Qi is drawn to the superstitions that live inside homes: grandma’s warnings, New Year taboos the shared family breath when facing the unknown. His work asks one clear ques tion:How do these tiny rituals enter our blood and decide how we love, how we fear, and what a “home” really is.
Zheng Shengtian
Zheng Shengtianis an artist, scholar and curator based in Vancouver. He is the Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, a Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University and a Trustee of Asia Art Archive in America. He was a Professor and Department Chair at China Academy of Art and a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota and the San Diego State University. He was the co-founder of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, a Trustee and the formal Adjunct Director of the Institute of Asian Art, Vancouver Art Gallery. He has organized and curated numerous exhibitions including Jiangnan—Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art Exhibitions, Shanghai Modern, 2004 Shanghai Biennale, Art and China’s Revolution and Winds from Fusang: Mexico and China in 20th Century. He was the senior curator for Asia of Vancouver Biennale and won the Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a frequent contributor to periodicals and catalogues. Four volumes of his writing on art and culture were published by China Academy of Art Press in 2013. His latest publications include Sino-Mexican Art and Cultural Exchanges in the Twentieth Century and Art and Modernism in Socialist China (co-editor). His artwork has been shown in China, the United States of America, Canada and Russia. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2013.
