ChinaTOwn

Who holds the right to decide what gets remembered? Conversely, the right to forget? ChinaTOwn tells the forgotten stories, willful omissions, and accumulation of silences that exist beyond Toronto’s official heritage definition of its Chinatown neighbourhoods. The exhibition aims to put personal stories and individual memory in conversation with state-sanctioned narratives.  

Each of the projects featured in ChinaTOwn explores what marginalized communities have known for some time—all that is written is not necessarily all that is, and what is remembered extends far beyond what is recorded.

Through a conceptual exhibition, participatory storytelling events, a symposium and roundtable discussion, we seek to uncover untold stories and build a collective, intersectional vision for the future heritage(s) of Toronto’s Chinatowns. Participants in the exhibition include interior design students at Toronto Metropolitan University led by Prof. Linda Zhang. Through a fourth-year design studio and a juried design competition, students were asked to incorporate community stories into their work. In doing so, each installation featured here reflects on their role, responsibility and agency as designers to protect the inhabitants and communities they design for.

You are invited to participate in the “Build Your Own Chinatown” board game (digital edition)!  Build your own Chinatown from a collection of 3D-scanned facades of Chinatown East — selecting elements and facades that personally define Chinatown for you. Record your game results in the player information card. By participating, you will contribute to an ongoing archive of “Build Your Own Chinatowns” which aims to explore important architectural heritage elements of Chinatown as identified by different community groups as well as untold stories about Chinatown. This installation announces the future heritage(s) of Toronto’s East Chinatown as a collective act to contribute to a shared future through community engagement and participation.

Linda Zhang mapped the buildings of Toronto Chinatowns using drones and 3D scanning technology. As she tried to find more information on the neighbourhoods’ heritage buildings, she discovered the lack of architectural drawings and documentation. In the initial stages, I set out to scan the architectural streets of Chinatown in 3D every year to at the very least make a detailed record of it. It is changing rapidly and Chinatowns are often overlooked as a site worth documenting or recording.  From then, the next question became about how we could use these heritage technologies to engage, support, or give agency to the community. In response to the question, we came up with the “Build Your Own Chinatown board game”.This board game asks how we remember and preserve places. As only 10 out of the 99 game pieces in the shape of individual Chinatown buildings are allowed on the board, the game becomes an invitation for conversation between two players who have to negotiate which buildings to keep and how they see the collective future of Chinatown. 

A large-scale wooden model of the Chinatown East Gate is installed in the gallery, acting as a backdrop to the game and holding several finished game sets Zhang has replicated in porcelain. With all these interventions, along with rising racial tensions and the current pandemic impacting Chinatowns, what becomes of a community’s centre? These works are fighting against the possibility of Chinatowns disappearing and asking us to join in to ensure the future of these cultural centres and our heritage.