Donna Seto | Re-Imagining Chinatown

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Donna Seto, “Re-Imagining Chinatown,” 2024

(courtesy of Donna Seto and THIS Gallery)

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 3 from noon to 4 pm. The artist will be in attendance.

THIS Gallery will host Re-Imagining Chinatown, a new solo exhibition by Vancouver artist/illustrator/writer, Donna Seto.

‘Chinatown’ has meant different things to different people. Racially segregated from broader society, Chinatowns have developed their own support mechanisms such as clan and social organizations that served as pseudo-families providing community, accommodation, safety net, and employment. To outsiders, however, Chinatowns are often distinguished as a separate space, visually represented through its architecture as well as its culture, sounds, tastes, and smells. The assumed distinction of “Chinatown” has historically sustained a perception that the area and the Chinese are separate from broader society, that Chinatown’s history and the experiences of the Chinese can be compartmentalized into either Chinese or a hyphenated version of Chinese-Canadian history. Until recently, very rarely has the history of Vancouver’s Chinatown and experiences of the Chinese in Canada been accepted as Canadian history.

“Donna Seto’s work represents an idealized fiction,” said THIS Gallery Director Shannon Pawliw. “It occupies a space that is both cartoonish and nostalgic as it is based on both remembered and factual history.”

Embedded in the paintings are questions regarding place and memory and the opportunity to create a dialogue that unravels and re-imagines a Chinatown that once was and could be. Through dreamy windows and shopfronts full of goods, Seto further depicts how buildings are more than just brick and mortar but keepers of secrets and history.

20% of all sales from this exhibition will be donated to the Chinatown Foundation. 

During the Taste of Chinatown Festival, visitors to the gallery can enter to win a Donna Seto print.

Re-Imagining Chinatown is supported by the Vancouver Heritage Foundation – Yosef Wosk Publication Grant and the Canada Council for the Arts. The paintings featured in this exhibition are part of a larger series that will be published as an illustrated history book.