Announcing our Community Partnership with the Surrey Art Gallery

The Powell Street Festival Society is pleased to announce our community partnership with the Surrey Art Gallery.

The 45th Annual Powell Street Festival, taking place both online and in the historic Paueru Gai (Powell Street) neighborhood this summer, is partnering with the Surrey Art Gallery, who are also celebrating their 45th anniversary, to include two multimedia installations within its festival offerings: Cindy Mochizuki’s Autumn Strawberry and Henry Tsang’s Hastings Park.

Cindy Mochizuki’s Autumn Strawberry uses hand-painted and digital animation to create an experience of life on Japanese Canadian farms before WWII. Emerging from her 2019 residency at the Surrey Art Gallery where she interviewed Nisei and Sansei (second and third generation) Japanese Canadians whose family worked on farms in the Frasier Valley, and explores farm life, as well as the “dream of riches” held by many Issei (first-generation) Japanese Canadians, deforestation, and the future. This installation features a 60-minute immersive hand-painted digital animation projected on the gallery wall and small-scale interactive sculptures scattered throughout.

(More information is available on the Surrey Art Gallery’s website at the following link: https://www.surrey.ca/arts-culture/surrey-art-gallery/exhibitions/cindy-mochizuki-autumn-strawberry)

In Hastings Park, Henry Tsang makes invisible history concerning Japanese Canadians during WWII visible again using a thermal imaging camera. Presenting photographs and projections of four buildings in Vancouver’s Hastings Park, where Japanese Canadians were detained before being sent to labour and internment camps, including the Livestock Building now associated with the Pacific National Exhibition. The thermal imaging technology used in this installation is typically used in the construction industry to reveal cracks or leaks in buildings through changes in temperature and light rays invisible to the human eye.

(More information on this exhibit is available on the Surrey Art Gallery’s website at the following link: https://www.surrey.ca/arts-culture/surrey-art-gallery/exhibitions/henry-tsang-hastings-park)

Both exhibitions use camera and projection technologies in unexpected ways to illuminate forgotten images and histories. The artists will participate in a talk streamed on the Surrey Art Gallery’s YouTube and Facebook pages on July 17 at 7:00 PM. Part of the Surrey Art Gallery’s summer series, both exhibitions can be seen at the Gallery June 26 through August 28. Admission is free, for gallery information, hours, and to book a tour of the exhibitions, visit https://www.surrey.ca/artgallery.

Tsang is also collaborating with the Powell Street Festival to present guided tours of the 360 Riot Walk, tracing the route of the 1907 anti-Asian riots, and to curate the Talking the Walk online panel discussion series, using the tour as an entry point to explore the history of anti-Asian violence and white supremacy in Vancouver.

The Surrey Art Gallery is located at
13750 88th Ave
Surrey, BC V3W 3L1