Curated by Jojo Chooi-Harley, the exhibition In the Wake of Work: Asian Diasporas, Labour, and Living Memory featuring the work of Holly Chang, mihyun maria kim and VALU CO-OP, explores how the Asian diasporic experience bridges space, tradition, and culture across generations, revealing how diasporic people hold collective memory around the confluence of loss of identity, unresolved grief, and labour pains.
Through the artwork on display, this exhibition celebrates the love of culture, community, and creativity expressed by this diaspora, demonstrating their strength, resiliency, and unity in the face of adversity.
JoJo Chooi-Harley 崔佳怡 is a registered social worker and psychotherapist, as well as a self-taught artist based in Hamilton, Ontario. As a first generation Chinese-Malay Canadian, her practice explores the diasporic impacts of immigration on familial relationships in Pan-Asian migrant families. She investigates how these families navigate intergenerational values, cultural identity, and belonging in the Canadian context. JoJo weaves storytelling, photo-voice photography, and printmaking to share deeply personal, autobiographical narratives that challenge Western dominant singular narratives. Her work is rooted in a commitment to decolonizing stereotypes of Canadian-born Chinese identities by fostering dialogue around family, resilience, sacrifice, labour, and unity in the face of adversity. Her art has been supported by the Ontario Arts Council, The Hamilton Artist’s Inc. (Hamilton: a guidebook from memory, group publication). Her recent exhibitions have been shown at Centre3 (Sayang, solo exhibit), the AGH (My Back Pages: The Art of Zines, group), and WAHC (Personal Narratives, group). In 2023, she was shortlisted in the City of Hamilton Arts Awards (Creator Category), and in 2024, she received the Hamilton Spectator Reader’s Choice Award (Diamond) for Mental Health Consultant.
Outside of her artistic and therapeutic work, JoJo is a proud mama to her two lovable pugs, Boba and BinBin. She is also the founder and organizer of Hamilton Pugs (@hamiltonpugs), a local community group that hosts monthly pug grumble meet-ups, bringing together pug lovers across the GTHA.
Holly Chang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto/Tkaronto. Chang makes use of a variety of artistic mediums including textiles, photography, ceramics, and natural dyeing. Her practice is rooted in intersectionality where she often explores her mixed-race —Jamaican-Chinese and white Canadian—and queer identity. Her overall artistic work explores the themes of her second-generation identity. She has recently exhibited her work in her first solo show with Gallery 44 in April 2022 and participated in the Banff Artist in Residence program in Spring 2022. Holly was the recipient for the Middlebrook Prize for curation in 2023, a prize which aims to foster social innovation and curatorial excellence in Canada. She currently works as a freelance artist and takes commissions.
VALU CO-OP is a Vancouver, BC based, democratically operated organization of artist-members. We are a values-driven unionized arts cooperative that believes in empowering artists and cultural workers through fair, secure, and flexible employment that supports artists to do what they do best—make art. We strive to do our work and organizing in an intersectional and anti-oppressive framework that supports our members’ needs, and which contributes meaningfully to our communities.
mihyun maria kim is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, researching (un)translatable affects shaped by languages entangled with unresolved historical grief and transmissions of longing. Exhaustion of the body, repetition of movement, fragments of hi/stories, and suspended feelings are explored between memory and imagination across space and time. Through relational methodology, her multivocal outcomes take in/visible form in poetry, painting, performance/activations, audio/video, site-specific installation, community-based round tables and public art.
Opening Reception and Performance by mihyun maria kim Friday May 9, 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Quilting Using Everyday Fabrics Second Saturday for families with Holly Chang, Saturday, May 10, 1 – 4 pm
Unions and Racism: Asiatic Exclusion League virtual program with Jonny Sopotiuk and a community facilitator (TBA), Thursday, June 19, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST
View the exhibition poster.
IMAGE AT TOP: VALU CO-OP, House of 9 Dragons, installation (2022). Alt-text: Elder Orville Lim providing tours and interviews of VALU CO-OP’s House of 9 Dragons installation featuring video recorded oral history interviews and hanging textured monoprints and calligraphic fabric prints.
IMAGE AT BOTTOM: Detail from Holly Chang, Yellow Red Quilt: Early Settlement (1868-1920), quilting and natural dyeing, 3’ x 4’, 2021. From the series Stitching the story of Chinese Canadian Histories: Quilting as an Archival Medium and Research-Praxis.
WAHC wishes to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Hamilton, the Province of Ontario, CUPE National, the Canada Council for the Arts, Canada’s Building Trades Unions, OPSEU/SEFPO and Teamsters Local Union 879 for their support of our exhibitions and ancillary programs.
For more information, please contact Sylvia Nickerson, Programming and Exhibitions Specialist, at (905) 522-3003 ex. 29 or sylvia@wahc-museum.ca
