Community-Artist-in-Residence

Annie Wong is the gallery’s 2020 Community-Artist-in-Residence. CAIR is a year-long program inviting professional artists with socially engaged practices to move artistic programming beyond the gallery walls and into the community.

Artist Bio

Annie Wong is a writer and multidisciplinary artist working in performance and installation. Her work begins at the intersections of the poetic and political in the matrix of everyday life, employing socially engaged and process-oriented methods of artistic collaboration often with everyday people. Conceptually diverse, her current research explores embodied and affective knowledge from the anger of BIPOC feminist histories and the melancholy of diasporic hauntologies. Wong has presented research and projects across North America with Open Source Gallery (NY, New York), The Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON), Studio XX (Montreal, QC), Third Space (Saint John, NB), and Intersite: Visual Arts Festival (Calgary, AB), among others. She has held residencies at The Art Gallery of Ontario, Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax, NS), the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Banff, AL), and most recently with the City of Calgary. Wong’s literary practice includes poetry, art writing and non-fiction. Her writing can be found in C Magazine, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Canadian Art, Performance Research Journal (UK), and MICE Magazine.

During her time with the gallery, Wong will continue her collaborative practice by engaging Markham’s Chinese residents to explore the complexities of diasporic identity and community

Associated programs and events

To make an auspicious home

February 15 – April 26, 2020

New this year, CAIR will feature in the Main Gallery! The pop-up exhibition will explore a nuanced cross-generational nostalgia embodied by the frequent appearance of folk art in Chinese-Canadian homes. The exhibition will comprise of objects borrowed from the living rooms of local Chinese residents in Markham and beyond. To lend your art to the gallery for this project, please visit our website or contact curator Anik Glaude at aglaude@markham.ca.

食飯,竹升女! | Enjoy the meal, ma!

March 29, 2020 | 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Barriers often occur as a common language shared by multiple generations of the same family becomes obscured when assimilating to Canadian culture. Annie Wong will practice speaking her lost mother-tongue with her mother, Minh and invites Cantonese and Mandarin speaking mothers and daughters who also experience these barriers to join them in friendly conversations over an informal hot pot dinner at the gallery.

Registration is required. Limited space available.

Mahjong Game Day

August 23, 2020 | 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. | Free

More details to come.

Image: Photo by Stefan Hagen for Open Source Gallery, 2019.