Revisit/

Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fond. Distance Makes the Heart Forget was created in an effort to capture the state of feeling simultaneously disconnected from erased histories and impacted by their legacies.

For the duration of the exhibition, AKA’s billboard will take the form of an intricate design of Chinese style clouds against the backdrop of the skies of Treaty 6. The piece incorporates three influences: one, Saskatchewan’s provincial slogan “Land of the Living Skies”; two, the word ‘celestials, a pejorative term used towards early Chinese settlers in the 19th century; and three, the Empyrean, a heaven where celestial beings are made of pure light, and the source of light and creation live in paradise in the clouds. 

The phrase 'Celestial Empire' (天朝), more or less meaning 'the empire ruled in accord with Heaven’, has a long history in China. The plural 'celestials’, referring to citizens of the Celestial Empire may have begun with American journalists searching for synonyms to describe groups of early Chinese settlers. Numerous news clippings and reports in the Saskatoon Local History Library have used the term celestial as an interchangeable stand-in for racial descriptors such as “Asian” or nationalities such as “Chinese”. Given the inferior economic and legal status of Chinese settlers at the time, the belief that they were associated with the heavens was an absurd concept to most white settlers. As such, the term became derogatory through mockery. The term celestial is now old enough that most Chinese-Canadians will now be unfamiliar with it and the hateful intent it embodied. The term celestial may not carry the sting it once did for Chinese communities. However, the knowledge of its existence and public unfamiliarity with its history, elicits the question—how is pain and grief measured and felt across distances of time? Utilizing Chinese motifs, Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fond, Distance Makes the Heart Forget claims a piece of the heavens and the sky for this chapter in Chinese-Canadian history.

I am revisiting this project at a time where we are looking back deeply and longingly forward. If the past and future are not separate, and are instead connected by our actions in present time:

What are the strategies and reasons behind unearthing the motifs and histories of the past?
How do we scrutinize how historic and contemporary images are circulated today?
Can the grammar of the ornament be imbued with endurance?