An excerpt from Gu Xiong — The River, the catalog from an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Please click here to visit the related page featuring photos taken from this exhibition. 

The First Nations were not the only marginalized peoples whose claims on place and whose histories were suppressed by acts of naming. Alan Haig-Brown reports, as a “well hidden fact of BC history,” that from the 1870s to the 1890s half the people living in the area of Quesnel were Chinese. In 1859, at the peak of the Fraser River gold rush, ten thousand miners came to the region. After most of the gold had been removed and gold fever had subsided, a number of Chinese stayed on to mine the ore that remained on the gravel bars of the river. The remnants of their cabins may be seen today, though nothing else-no monument, no marker, no place name—records their working presence in the landscape. This lack of recognition is repeated lower downriver, in the region around Lytton, where nine thousand of the thirteen thousands workers building track for the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s were Chinese. That was fully seventy percent of the work force. And it is repeated again at the mouth of the Fraser, where thousands of Chinese worked in the salmon canneries, that is, until “the invention of a mechanical gang knife eliminated them from the industry.” The canning companies and white factory hands called the machine the “Iron Chink.” Few written or photographic documents record the involvement in British Columbia of this migrant labour force from China. The size of it puts one in mind of Gu Xiong’s migrating salmon in The River. In both, the numbers are too great to count with precision.

The Chinese labourers who traveled across the Pacific Ocean to find jobs on the CPR line, ironically, found themselves working on behalf of the unfinished project of Western colonization. British Columbia was one in the final sites of the westward push of Euro-American expansionism. That was the historical context for the Chinese coming to Canada, a context explored by Gu Xiong in a subsequent multimedia installation employing train tracks and video, called The Mountains. The colonial context has caused the Chinese to be doubly displaced within the social fabric of the province, for they were part neither of the dominant white society, nor the non-white native society. Their position was “invisible.” The River helps to contest these effect of erasure and colonization. It helps to unmake cultural meanings that have become rigidified. In the ongoing business of “decolonization,” The River helps us to see what has been obscured.

— John O’Brian