Credit: Henry Tsang, Hastings Park: Building A - Livestock Building North, View Looking West (detail), 2021.
Henry Tsang: Hastings Park
With a thermal imaging camera, multimedia artist Henry Tsang makes Hastings Park's invisible history visible again concerning Japanese Canadians during WWII.
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This multimedia installation presents photographs and projections of four buildings at Hastings Park in Vancouver, where, in 1942, roughly 8000 Japanese Canadians were marshalled and detained prior to being sent to internment and labour camps in the BC interior, Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario. Among the four buildings is the Livestock Building—a place associated nowadays with the Pacific National Exhibition’s popular pig races and petting zoo.
Tsang used a thermal imaging camera to create his images based in part on the compositions and staging of Leonard Frank’s documentary photographs of the Japanese Canadian internment in this temporary incarceration site. A thermal imaging camera is typically used in the construction industry to display differences in temperature by detecting light rays that are invisible to the human eye. Such photographs can reveal leaks or cracks in a building.
Along with Cindy Mochizuki: Autumn Strawberry, Henry Tsang: Hastings Park uses camera and projection technologies in unexpected ways to illuminate forgotten images and histories.
About the Artist
Henry Tsang is an artist and occasional curator based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. His projects explore the spatial politics of history, language, community, food, and cultural translation in relationship to place. These take the form of gallery exhibitions, pop-up street food offerings, 360 video walking tours, curated dinners, ephemeral and permanent public art, employing video, photography, language, interactive media, food, and convivial events. Projects include 360 Riot Walk, a 360 video walking tour of the 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver, Canada, and Welcome to the Land of Light, a public artwork along Vancouver's seawall that underscores the 19th century trade language Chinook Jargon and the English that replaced it. Henry teaches at Emily Carr University of Art & Design.
Curator: Jordan Strom
Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery
Community Partners: Powell Street Festival in Vancouver and Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre in Burnaby.
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Henry Tsang, Hastings Park: Building A - Livestock Building North, East Entrance, 2021, pigment ink on metallic paper, 122 cm x 91 cm. Photo by artist.
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Henry Tsang, Hastings Park: Building A - Livestock Building North, View Looking West, 2021, pigment ink on metallic paper, 122 cm x 91 cm. Photo by artist.
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Henry Tsang, Hastings Park Buildings A, F, K, L, 2021, projected thermal imaging video stills. Photo by artist.
