Talkback Tour: Diana Lary, Professor Emeritus of Chinese History, UBC

Talkback Tours are an ongoing series of in-person tours led by community members sharing their responses to our exhibitions.

Join Diana Lary, Professor Emeritus, Department of History and Former Director, Centre for Chinese Research at UBC, and Wendy Jang, Richmond Public Library’s Coordinator of Collections & Customer Service Delivery, for an informal conversation in the Gallery. They will discuss and reflect upon the objects borrowed from the Richmond Public Library’s Dr. Lee Collection that are on display within the Amy Ching-Yan Lam exhibition a small but comfy house and maybe a dog.

Free drop in.

About the Presenters:
Diana Lary is professor emeritus of Chinese History at the University of British Columbia. She has worked on the history of the Republic, migration, and war and society. Her most recent publication is China’s Grandmothers, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Wendy Jang is the Coordinator of Collections and Customer Service Delivery at Brighouse Branch, Richmond Public Library.

About the Exhibition:
The title of this exhibition comes from a text, “Me in the Future,” that Amy Ching-Yan Lam wrote at age eleven and put in a time capsule, speculating by the age of twenty-five she’d be married, have a career, and “a small but comfy house and maybe a dog.” Starting from these childhood fantasies of domestic love and financial stability, Lam presents artworks that explore how these dreams function within the wider context of colonial history. With humour and acuity, she examines the relationships between property, family, institutional power and collections, and theft.
Expanding on how collections are formed and accessed, Lam has worked with the Richmond Public Library to bring a selection of items from their Dr. Kwok-Chu Lee Collection into the gallery. In turn, the Richmond Art Gallery participates in a lending program of artworks from their Collection, accessible through the Public Library, over the duration of Lam’s exhibition.