January 22 – April 3
Nourish
Richmond Art Gallery
7700 Minoru Gate
Opening: January 22, 1pm – 3pm

The Richmond Art Gallery presents NOURISH, a new exhibition on display from January 22 to April 3, 2022, by curator Nan Capogna. Featuring American poet and writer Jane Wong and Vancouver-based artist duo Mizzonk (Wan-Yi Lin and Roger Chen), the exhibition offers insights into ideas around nourishment and care.

For her Canadian premiere, Wong will present After Preparing the Altar, The Ghosts Feast Feverishly, an installation that features an oversized, round dining table that holds bowls containing fragments of a poem written by the artist. Viewers must walk around the table in order to read the full poem. Food imagery pays homage to Wong’s experiences growing up in her family’s Chinese American restaurant in the 1980s and ‘90s. It also recalls her family’s history of hunger during the Great Leap Forward, a campaign to implement agricultural and industrial reforms that claimed an estimated 36 million lives through the resulting Great Famine. Wong’s artworks address this historical juxtaposition of hunger and gluttony, as well as familial labour, and silenced histories. First shown at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum in 2019 — her first solo art show — the installation has been adapted for the RAG exhibition and features updated elements, including a new chandelier comprised of soup spoons. The work will be accompanied by The Long Labors, a video of the artist reciting the poem while making dumplings. Seattle-based Wong is the author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (2021) and Overpour (2016). She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa, a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

For the exhibition, Mizzonk will present a new work titled Six Acres, named after the six-acre expanse in Maple Ridge the artist duo calls home. A projected animation produced from watercolour drawings on paper, the work was developed from Mizzonk’s observations of living and working in the serene, outdoor escape. The pair moved to the rural stretch of land after experiencing 9/11 from the rooftop of their Brooklyn studio; they decided to move outside of urban centres in search of a restorative environment. Their lives today centre around the natural rhythms found in the tranquility of their new surroundings, such as the sounds of a running creek and ripples across a pond. Mizzonk is the collective name of Taiwanese Canadians Wan-Yi Lin and Roger Chen, both graduates of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Recent projects include a work at the Oak Bay Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition; a temporary public art installation at Space works Tacoma, Washington; and a piece at the Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition in La Conner, Washington.

All events will be held in strict compliance with the province’s latest health orders. For more details about the gallery’s COVID-19 safety precautions, programming information, and registration, visit richmondartgallery.org. For more details about #RichmondHasHeart, visit richmond.ca/richmondhasheart.

More info: https://www.richmondartgallery.org/nourish