Visual PDF available online: grunt.ca.
Published February 2024.
Author of alt text: Kay Slater
Introduction to alternative text catalogue:
Our approach to alternative text is one of creative access, merging creativity, information and function. We are all artists, and while we try to minimize subjective language, we are working to provide a catalogue that creates an enjoyable experience for our non-visual audience and those better served by text!
We welcome feedback from our audiences. Please contact us at access@grunt.ca with any questions or feedback.
Creative Access Descriptions:
An exhibition pamphlet printed on soft newsprint paper the colour of vanilla pudding. The newsprint laid flat is about the size of a shoebox or a computer monitor. The paper is folded accordion-style, creating a zigzag-style line along the top or the bottom edges. The following description assumes you open the pamphlet like an English book, turning the pages along the right edge, flipping the entire pamphlet as you reach the end, and continuing flipping along the right edge. When unfolded or laid flat, each page appears as three columns. Some pamphlet copies have a tactile square added to the cover or title page in the lower right corner.
Page 1, cover:
The first column, or the cover page, begins with small, black, sans-serif text that reads grunt gallery. February 3rd – March 16th 29th, 2024. Below that is a large, portrait-oriented snapshot photo of a teenager and an adult in casual clothes, named Mercedes and her father at Drumheller Penitentiary, 1983. The youth, Mercedes Eng, one of the two curators of the show, stands with her father, Sue Dong, in front of a panelled wall. Their clothes and hairstyles have a 1970s vibe; Mercedes sporting a layered and feathered haircut, and Sue Dong with a pencil-thin moustache.
At the bottom of the page is text in a large, thin, black-serif font. The text reads: Sue Dong Eng and Mercedes Eng, Inside Out: the art show my dad never had.
Page 2:
The second column, or page, on the front side is all text. It is the same black sans-serif font used at the top of the cover page. At the footer, the grunt gallery logo (the word grunt in lower case in white on a black brushstroke of black) sits above a line of gallery and exhibition funders. They are acknowledged in the text credits. The text on this page reads:
grunt gallery
Inside/Out: the art show my dad never had
Sue Dong Eng and Mercedes Eng
116 – 350 East 2nd Avenue
Vancouver, BC Canada
V5T 4R8
grunt.ca
Curator: Mercedes Eng and Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa
Writer: Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa
Designer: Victoria Lum
Copy Editor: Katrina Orlowski
Photographer: Photograph courtesy of Mercedes Eng
Printed in Canada by Moniker Press
Edition of 200
ISBN: 978-1-988708-26-3
All Rights Reserved Publication © 2024 grunt gallery
Artwork © 2024 the artists
Text © 2024 the authors
All images courtesy of the artists
© Copyright grunt gallery, the writers and the artists. Content from this book cannot be reproduced without express permission from the publisher.
grunt gallery is located on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, who have lived in kinship with this land, water and air for thousands of years. We recognize and acknowledge their leadership and our own complicity in settler colonialism, its present occupation and its violent legacy. We acknowledge our responsibility to work actively in support of Indigenous sovereignty, and towards a respectful relationship with this place.
grunt gallery gratefully acknowledges support from The Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, The Canada Council for the Arts, The British Columbia Arts Council, The City of Vancouver, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Vancouver Foundation.
Page 3:
A note from the describer: Although this is named page three within the description and refers to the third and last column of content on this side of the folded pamphlet, this section is numbered as page one, similar to a book publication where this would be the first page of content following the colophon or publishing information pages.
A graphic shows a cold, blue-grey-coloured rectangle over which are two stacked images. The top image is credited as — Mercedes’s father, grandmother, and uncle in Chinatown. It is a black and white image the three people in front of a 1950s era car. The middle figure, Mercedes’ grandmother, holds a young, pacifier-suckling child in her arms. A teenager in a white tee shirt and baggy pants leans against the car.
The bottom image is in colour and is identified as — Mercedes, her father and her mother with a prison fence behind them. Circa 1974. The image is ragged with folds and creases, visibly preserved after scanning it to digital. Sue Dong is bent forward, his hands on his knees, and Mercedes’ mother stands behind him to give the impression that she is on his shoulders. Mercedes’ is a baby and is riding her mother’s shoulders and so the three look stacked on top of each other. Beyond the three figures is a green mountain and a sunny clear sky.
Page number 1 appears in a tiny font, and below this, the essay author, Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, and the title, “On both sides of the fence, we create,” are listed in a font similar to the front cover.
Back-side:
The back side of the pamphlet also has three sections which are printed as columns between each of the folds. The back pages are all text, using the same small sans-serif font used on sections of the pages on the front side. Near the bottom left corner of all the pages is a number in thin serif font labelling each page: 2, 3 and 4.
The following is the text, edited to flow for easy reading on a screen reader or by a AI voice-over agent. Following the title is a poem written in 2 line stanzas, and then the essay begins with the sentence, “early in the summary of 2022”. Wherever the country canada is written, it has been purposely written with a lowercase c. Footnotes are included within the flow of the text. In the pamphlet, footnotes are clustered in tiny type in a small square in the bottom right corner of each folded section.
Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa.
On both sides of the fence, we create.
Poem titled: Accompaniment, by Sreshta Rit Premnath, from the 2019 publication Those Who Wait.
There is no being,
but being with,
even if we must keep,
the company of ghosts,
or speak to hazy figures,
beyond memory’s edge,
to lean,
is to be held,
the wall that separates,
must also support,
the weight of time,
without direction,
unbearable alone,
unburdened together,
there is only being,
in being for each other,
the provisional ground,
on which we wait,
is the very site,
of the claim we make.
Early in the summer of 2022, I slid into Mercedes Eng’s DMs.
We were mutuals on Instagram (meaning that when I followed her some months before, she followed me back) which I was pretty excited about, and probably felt emboldened by. I’d seen Mercedes’ work around, but I was able to dig deep into it in a Woman of Colour Feminism art history class taught by Dr. Sue Shon at art school, only a year or two prior.
I reached out to Mercedes when I was working on a residency that focused on reflections of this city, while working with the archive of a local gallery. I had the inclination -and eventually, some budget—to collaborate with other creatives in the city, and Mercedes really quickly came to mind as someone I wanted to work with. I was interested in chatting together about her process and practice, unpacking some of the parallels between the rise of violent anti-Asian rhetoric that had surfaced in the early stages of this ongoing pandemic era, and in the first half of the twentieth century. I also wanted to think through how this—along with forces of gentrification—was shaping such a historic and important local ecosystem as Chinatown, which was complicated further by being an immigrant settler presence on stolen land.
In the conversations that shaped our first artistic collaboration, Mercedes generously shared with me some of the digitized family archive she and her relatives had been gathering. She talked about the images, her upbringing, and her ties to our local Chinatown with the spirit of a reluctant archaeologist. She wanted to incorporate some of this body of work into our first project but I advised against it, instinctually feeling that this archival collection could and should be something bigger than what this first project allowed for.
Footnote one: My strong instinctual responses have been lovingly dubbed quote: the Keimi gut, unquote, by my friend and colleague Kay Slater. Kay’s encouragement to listen to my gut has allowed me to turn down an array of projects that would’ve burnt me out (to a crisp) and follow the electric currents of work and connections I’m passionate about. Footnote ends.
I kept it in the back of my mind, as something I could eventually pitch as an exhibition proposal somewhere, or apply to a grant for.
A few months later, through the trust and generosity of the team at grunt, I was able to bring this project to the gallery as a guest curator. It’s been pretty wild to have gone from a fan of Mercedes’ work, to her co-curator for a deeply personal project in the span of only a few years. As the project took shape, it was clear that her dad’s works in particular could add a layer of depth and relevance to the conversations we wanted to have through a public presentation. He had deep familial connections to Chinatown, and had been subject to a system of policing and carcerality, which increasingly affects the neighbourhood today. He came into an art practice that sustained him, through an institution where he experienced violence. As a human and as an artist, he brushed up against carceral and colonial systems, where many of his collaborators were Indigenous, incarcerated on their own ancestral lands.
Planning a public presentation (and therefore conversation) while holding all of these nuances and complications can be tricky, to say the least. I have at times felt like a voyeur or outsider to such an intimate collection of labour and objects, but while planning this exhibition, I keep going back to Mirtha N. Quintanales’ contribution to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour, where she says, quote: I think we need to keep in mind that in this country, in this world, racism is used to both create false differences among us and to mask very significant ones— cultural, economic, political…, unquote.
Describer note. The number 151 is listed here in brackets, followed by Footnote 2.
Footnote two: by Mirtha N. Quintanales, “I Paid Very Hard for My Immigrant Ignorance.” from the publication This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour, fourth edition, 2015. SUNY Press. Footnote end] I am passionate about this project because I believe we as immigrant settlers can celebrate our accomplishments, grieve our separation from our ancestral lands, and do better for the lands we inhabit which we don’t belong to. I believe that these things can all exist at once, and that our tangled connecting ties are important.
Inside/Out: the art show my dad never had, to me, is a work of loving and speculative imagination through three directions of time. We move backwards through past decades, on the vessels of archival materials which Mercedes and her family have so carefully collected. We imagine what must’ve been going through teenaged Sue Dong’s head as he grumpily takes a photo in his casually rebellious clothes next to his dolled-up family. We slice the present open, and speak his name, holding him while we clean, and place, and admire his work that exists alongside us today. We turn over a lunar new year, and ponder what futures might have ensued for him if he had not been exposed to substance use through nightlife at the cabaret at a young age. If he had not been incarcerated. If he had found art sooner. If, if, if…
As Saidiya Hartman says in “Notes on Method” at the opening of her book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, I similarly hope that for Sue Dong. Quote: I have crafted a counter-narrative liberated from the judgement and classification that subjected young black women to surveillance, arrest, punishment and confinement, and offer an account that attends to beautiful experiments—to make living an art…endquote.
Describer’s note: the roman numeral 14 or X-I-V is here in brackets, followed by Footnote 3.
Footnote 3: A quote by Saidiya Hartman, called “A Note on Method.” from the publication Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, first edition, 2019. W.W. Norton & Company. End footnote.
As someone who has both been a part of planning several exhibitions and is endeavouring into curatorial work formally for the first time, Sue Dong’s absence from the physical realm has been clear. It has been both a lot of pressure, and such a gift to bring his and Mercedes’ work to life in the gallery, and I feel honoured to have been able to do so.
I do believe that this celebration of Sue Dong’s life and practice, tenderly encircled by Mercedes’ words, is an affront to the popular and incorrect idea that canada as a nation-state is a safe and easy place for im/migrants and racialized people to exist.
Describer’s note: Keimi writes immigrants here as I-M-slash-M-I-G-R-A-N-T-S.
Footnote 4: While there are lots of forms of empirical evidence of this, I wanted to highlight the fact that canada does not have a limit to the amount of time migrants can be held in detention, without any criminal charges. And while some government entities are claiming to want to change that, most are actually extending contracts that allow them to continue indefinite detention practices. Hanna Gros, Samer Muscati. From the article “Another Canadian Province to End Immigration Detention in its Jails”. Describer’s note: The author includes a URL to the article on hrw.org in this footnote. For the full URL, please contact any grunt staff and we will send you the link. Footnote ends.
At the same time, I want to emphasize that Sue Dong is not a martyr for this cause, nor for his art. He was a dad, a husband, and an imperfect human like the rest of us. He had creative outlets and hopes and aspirations, along with fabulous etching and woodworking skills. While this exhibition does not absolve the fact that he was harmed and caused harm, I hope that this impermanent space in the gallery, a gallery which has held so much of my own messiness and aspirations, creates a little bubble of safety and validation that he and other artists like him deserve.
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