Paul Wongs Occupying Chinatown, a beautifully detailed, limited edition hardcover book, fully bilingual in English and Simplified Chinese, focuses on several of Wongs major artworks exploring Chinese Canadian identity and his engagement with Vancouvers Chinese communities. With full colour photos and documentation of Wongs artwork as well as three original essays, Occupying Chinatown is an evocative exploration of language, amnesia, and cultural displacement, inspired by 900 letters sent to Suk-Fong Wong, Paul Wongs mother, over the course of 65 years.

Within this remarkable 180-page cloth-bound book, Wongs essay Suk Fong, How Are You? (?) takes a closer look at the family histories contained within the letters, while Dr. Christopher Lees essay Reading Letters, Reading with Trust () reflects on the process of interpreting a selection of these letters with his students. Debbie Cheungs Private to Private to Public: A New Collective Experience of Chinatown () details Wongs year-long residency at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden through which these private letters offered an opportunity for the local Chinese community to consider their shared stories and their rapidly changing Chinatown.

I am not an academic; this book is not an historical document. I am neither an ethnographer nor a documentarian, and this is not a memoir or a genealogical family account. Above all, I have approached this out of curiosity about what has been lost through silence. Occupying Chinatown has provided a conceptual frame for inspiring a prolific outpouring of artworks combining fragments of memory, language, and ephemeral histories. It has continued and will continue to allow me to look at everyday things as anything but ordinary.

Paul Wong

Occupying Chinatown features original collages, reproductions and stills from several of Wongs significant works including Fathers Words, based on his mothers letters; Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade, a 1988 video work exploring Wongs first trip back to China; Mothers Cupboard / , a series of prints featuring his mothers treasured jars of traditional elixirs and ingredients; and Saltwater City Vancouver /, a neon piece installed in several locations throughout Vancouver.

On Main is grateful to the sponsors and funders:
The Canada Council, City of Vancouver, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, The Audain Foundation, and Rick Erickson and Donna Partridge.

Edited byPaul Wong
Contributions byChristopher Lee,Debbie Cheung, Paul Wong

Edition of 500

180pages
9.3 x11.7 inches
ISBN9780969477778
approx. 110 colour illustrations
Hardcover, black linen with silver deboss
On Main
2021