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Pencil and graphite on rice paper roll | 2023 - ongoing

As a 2023 Canadian Centre for Architecture Virtual Fellow, I examined traditional Chinese art principles to create three 11” by 720” scroll drawings that reinterpret Felice Beato’s photographs of China during the Second Opium War (1860), taken shortly after Hong Kong was colonized by the British. Traditional Chinese scroll artworks are intended to be read from right to left as the scroll is gradually unraveled. Unlike the instantaneous confrontation of a photograph, handscrolls allow for a progression through time and space— in both the literal and narrative sense. Further, unlike photography, handscrolls utilize ‘moving focus,’ where the point-of-view depicted in a single scroll shifts as it progresses, encouraging a richer, continuous interaction as the scroll is unraveled.

The scrolls resurface the elements hidden and obstructed by Beato’s colonial gaze, such as the people who refused to stand still for his photographs and are instead rendered as an anonymous blur.  Guided by traditional principles and materials, I used hand-drawing with graphite on rice paper rolls to provide a contemporary re-examination of the events in Beato’s photos, subverting their colonial modernity and the totality of his technology by combining disparate points-of-view that cannot be achieved using a camera and through drawing the blurred figures who evaded his camera’s focus. The project examines the complicated ethics of Beato’s work, and by extension how to reconcile the beauty of war photography with the violence they depict. The act of creating this artwork was my act of decolonizing war photographs and the context from which they spawned.

An article about this research and the digitization of the completed scrolls for dissemination are in progress.

I acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Canadian Centre for Architecture.