Third Scenario Essay
The Third Scenario examines the act of art making through hyphenated conditions – states and environments in flux that challenge the idea of art and identity as fixed entities. Engaging critical approaches to making, artists Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Joy Wong, Lan “Florence” Yee, and Justin Ming Yong explore personal narratives to question what it means to create while living in Canada, collectively pointing to how liminality – being ‘in-between’ – involves not only ambiguity, but transformation. Disrupting and inverting the expectations of both art and representation, the artists push beyond medium specificity, investigating materialist impulses through textiles, text-based and mixed media works, as well as installation.
Bringing ideas of craft and visual art into a critical dialogue, there is a throughline of textile methodologies in the artists’ work. Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s pieces include two washi paper garments, exploring traditional craft practices including ink, natural dyeing, printmaking, and papermaking to highlight aspects of her heritage. Reflecting her ongoing engagement with the practice of kamiko (washi garment making), Firefighter’s Jacket andLong Cut Hoodie speak to tradition as well as the versatility of paper and its technical capabilities. Joy Wong’s approach to making includes the use of unconventional materials such as kombucha leather, infusing their work with precarity and fluctuation through processes such as fermentation. In microbiological terms, the bacterial culture involved in fermenting foods represents an environment of symbiosis and care – a form of codependency that for the artist is also inherent to human culture. Lan “Florence” Yee’s works feature two distinct methods of creation: a four-channel LED sign and a dual-layer textile, both integrating text-based approaches. The LED sign depicts a collection of conflicting competing desires that converge to underscore the mundane conditions of their creation. The layered print depicts plant leaves poking out from curtain blinds with text reading ‘which came first, the home or the stranger?’. The two works inhabit and question uncomfortable spaces. Justin Ming Yong adopts and adapts a family tradition, quilt making, exploring unconventional and modern approaches to the folk-art practice. Represented in this exhibition with three of these works, Yong considers his own ancestry through themes of forgotten landscapes, cherished foods, and exploited histories.
The Third Scenario is inspired by theorists such as Homi Bhabha and his concept of the ‘Third Space,’ which explores the interstices of colliding cultures, and John and Ruth Useem’s work investigating ‘Third Culture Kids’ – those raised in a culture and nation separate from their parents’ culture and country of nationality for a significant part of their development. Third Culture Kids straddle different worlds, creating a hybrid third culture that underscores diasporic existence. This exhibition aims to investigate this alternative third space and what it means to create works within it. Bhabha describes the Third Space as a hybridization of cultural authority where perspectives converge and emphasize new features. Reinforcing this triadic framework, this work is also inspired by the writings of Trinh T. Minh-Ha – in particular, When the Moon Waxes Red. A collection of short essays that challenge Western approaches to knowledge, the section titled “The Third Scenario” tackles the terrain of personal expression through self-representation. Embracing these ideas, the artists willingly and consciously resist the pervasive urge to assimilate, reshaping the discourse on self-representation by challenging prevailing norms and expectations.
With a focus on how hybridity is expressed in artists’ work, the exhibition refuses to settle in one world or another, crossing boundaries of identity and geography while transcending binary dichotomies of cultural heritage. Collectively, the works evoke a strong sense of artistic production as an investigation of their own experience, contextualizing this within a broader community and culture. As each artist expands their medium, ideas of place or placelessness are also destabilized, pointing to the complexity of creation and subjectivity in the contemporary Canadian arts landscape.