January 11 to February 26, 2021
“Paradoxical though it sounds, daydreaming is what makes us organized,” says Eric Klinger, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. “We think of daydreams as scatterbrained and unfocused, but one of the functions of daydreaming is to keep your life’s agenda in front of you; it reminds you of what’s coming up, it rehearses new situations, plans the future and scans past experiences so you can learn from them.’ 1
The works of artists Yong Fei Guan and Wei Li are highly spirited and at first seem as though they are attempting to transport the viewer far away from reality. Their respective sculptures and paintings suggest a preoccupation with whimsy, fantasy and humour. However, the complex visual language and material manipulation techniques that each artist has developed are tools for working through complex issues of identity, ecology and representation.
The artists share the experience of emigrating from China as young women to pursue their ambitions as artists in Canada. Through their art making processes, Yong and Li contend with their hybrid realities as immigrants and contemporary artists in a society that strives (though often unsuccessfully) to celebrate a diversity of voices.
Coming from a culture that wastes nothing, and having trained as a Master Composter Recycler by the City of Edmonton, the concept of repurposing and healing are at the core of Yong’s creative practice. As a first generation Chinese-Canadian, Yong wants to provide a deeper understanding of contemporary Chinese culture through a humorous lens, while referencing social and political events between the two countries. With this work, Young addresses a recent point in Canada and China’s shared history: China accepting large volumes of recyclables from Canadian municipalities until 2018 when China stopped accepting them. Canadians have been forced to rethink our waste system. Yong encourages us to rethink the past, and learn from it.
Painter Wei Li’s dual cultural experience enables her to understand Canadian society as a plurality, and she expresses this with dynamic visual abstractions. Li takes a modernist approach to painting by being absorbed in the process. Her works have a sense of freedom and abandon. For Li, her experience of contemporary life, her imagination and her subconscious subsist when she paints, and from this organic patterns, symbols and gestures emerge. On her search for a visual language to describe conflicting forces within our modern society, Li grapples with the psychological complexity of representing a way of being that has yet to be, or maybe cannot be explicitly defined. As Li Says: “The participation of immigrant artists help to builds a stronger and more diversified Canadian contemporary art community.”
1 (https://www.psychologies.co.uk/self/what-your-daydreams-reveal-about-you.html, Judith Woods for Psychologies UK)