Vancouver-based visual artist Julian Yi-Jong Hou’s first solo exhibition, a multi-sensorial experience bridging Pagan traditions from Europe and Zen Buddhist practices, is featured at the Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver until January 2021.
With every rush of wind every cell returns to Home-e-o-stasis & from the ground we pick up a piece every piece we pick up is put back
Julian Yi-Jong Hou, Grass Drama, 2020, vinyl recording
Grass Drama draws from a rich field of pagan, psychedelic, magic, and Orientalist influences to make a work that is Chinese Canadian without pandering to a white colonial audience.
In Hou’s multi-media installation, a vinyl record, a one-night performance, and an accompanying suite of printed patterns hung in the street-level windows wrapping the gallery’s façade are used as platforms.
Hou uses these spaces (sound, presence, sight, intuition) to share his vision about the complex colonial history between England and China, the history of the injustices of the Opium war, as well as the unjust histories that faced Chinese immigrants to Canada.
Developed over a two-year period, and guided by a process of sensitivity training involving divination, hypnagogic practices, and expanded states of consciousness, Grass Drama also explores practices of anti-oppressive spiritualism as a way to transcend mechanisms of systemic oppression – which, to Hou, prevents individuals from achieving self-possession.
Alternate realms
In Pandemic is a Portal (2020), his previous exhibition at the SFU Audain Gallery, Hou claimed that to clear the mind, one must be willing to let the mind be cleared.
“My journey using Ketamine helped me to clarify how my own mind had been oppressed by several subconscious falsehoods,” he says.
Pandemic is a Portal was an invitation to understand how hallucinogens can help someone commit to the act of clearance and have faith in achieving self-possession. In Hou’s words, the mind is beyond the brain, yet it is colonized by spirituality, science, and culture.
However, what happens when an artist crosses the hallucinatory limits of memory, culture, language, and symbolism, experiments with processes of sensitivity training, and realizes how vast and continuous the well of creativity truly is?
Sound as art, vinyl as platform
every piece we pick up we mark as we put it back every piece we pick up we mark with our name every piece we pick up is put back with our name and the time what is the time again? remind me of the time again?
Julian Yi-Jong Hou, Grass Drama, 2020, vinyl recording
At the Grass Drama exhibit, a speculative and cyclical record’s narrative structure experiments with the recorded album as an art form, accompanied by a suite of digitally rendered patterns in the gallery´s windows.
“Vinyl pressing is a really sophisticated and technically complex craft that’s actually relatively affordable to produce, and I’ve started becoming interested in collecting objects myself after many years of feeling detached from objects,” says Hou.
“Lyric writing, for me, is a kind of channeling process of singing sounds that sound like words, and then trying to find words in the sounds that make sense. The rest of the text is divination which has been a writing process of using Tarot readings to produce text.”
Visiting Grass Drama at the Contemporary Art Gallery
Due to COVID-19, CAG is welcoming on-site visitors on a timed-entry basis, with visits scheduled each hour on the hour. Space is limited and advanced booking is highly encouraged through the gallery’s website. Although donations are welcome, admission to the gallery is free of charge.
Hou’s exhibition on the façade of the Contemporary Art Gallery is available to view at all hours without an appointment at 555 Nelson Street in downtown Vancouver.
