Charlotte Yao At Canton-sardine

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Charlotte Yao, “To America,” 2021, inkjet print photography and photo collage on frame, 17" x 13" x 3" (photo courtesy of Canton-sardine)

Stepping into Charlotte Yao’s solo exhibition at Canton-sardine feels like walking into a dense fog. 

Gray and black are the exhibition’s dominant tones. A dimly colour-graded three-channel video installation anchors the main exhibition space. The installation is accompanied by a series of blurred black-and-white photographs and a large, ghost-like print (134" x 107") suspended from the ceiling against the wall, gently drifting in the gallery’s ventilation currents. Composed of overlapping images of iron gates found by the artist, this print represents the imagined “gate to America.”

Yao’s solo exhibition, on view until July 12, 2025, carries an ironic and striking title: Let’s Go to America. In today’s global context, the phrase may even evoke a sense of unease. 

The title comes from Yao’s three-channel video work of the same name, inspired by a lie told by her paternal relatives when she was five years old. That lie forcibly separated her from her mother, ruptured her bonds with her hometown and mother, and marked the beginning of her long diasporic journey. 

To produce the three-channel video, Yao returned to her birthplace and retraced the late-night journey her father’s relatives once took, driving her from her hometown to the town where Yao’s father lived. 

As viewers move among these lens-based works, they are drawn into the artist’s memories — immersed in a space of recollection that evokes an overwhelming sense of suffocation. 

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Charlotte Yao, “Gate,” 2024, laser print photographic collage, 134” x 107”, 2024 (photo courtesy of Canton-sardine)

The memory shared by the artist is both deeply buried and eerily false, as illusory as the ghostly “gate to America” and the heavily perfumed diffuser placed conspicuously in a corner of the exhibition space. Its synthetic scent and visible appearance are designed to attract the viewer’s curiosity, drawing attention to the fragrance of gardenia which grows in the artist’s hometown. Carrying a profound nostalgia, it is still contrived and artificial.

The main exhibition design immerses viewers in the three-channel video installation and lets them wander into Yao’s seemingly endless recollections, set against the backdrop of the overwhelming “gate to America”. 

The first and second floor of the gallery is divided by a curtain-like photographic print. Its title is prominently printed on the gallery wall: “990206 The last Chinese New Year Mum spent with you. After that, your father took you away.”

In terms of visual presentation, “blurriness” and “displacement” are two key words that stand out in this body of work. The three-channel video work "Let’s Go to America" and the over-three-metre-tall photographic print installation "You see, that is the gate to America" occupy the gallery’s central space. 

The former is accompanied by Yao’s indistinct and fragmented voiceover, interwoven at times with the original audio of the footage. While subtitles provide supplemental information, they do not align exactly with the spoken narration. 

Aside from the artist’s subdued narration, the video's background sound occasionally features a soft rustling, reminiscent of stepping on dried leaves. According to Yao, this sound was recorded as she shredded two large prints from this exhibition, which symbolized separation and memory.

Through these works, Yao confronts the enduring trauma of that night while reflecting on her childhood separation from her mother, her reluctant immigration to Canada as a teenager under her father’s economic and patriarchal control, and the growing emotional distance between herself, her parents, and her hometown. 

The artist offers a reflection not only for herself but for others who share similar experiences of diaspora and familial displacement.

In Yao’s multiple narratives, America holds a significant symbolic meaning. Much like the popularized notion of the American Dream, America signifies wealth, freedom, and aspirations. It is the vast fantasy of the Western world, projected onto Yao and other East Asian women such as herself by patriarchal systems, even before Yao’s identity had a chance to fully form. 

As a child, Yao told her father’s relatives that she wanted to go to America — a declaration that initiated the traumatic separation from her mother. That verbal promise she made as a child continues to haunt her in adulthood. 

That promise also prompts a critical reevaluation of what immigration to the Western world truly means for East Asian women, particularly when such migration takes place under structurally unequal economic and gender conditions. 

This reflection becomes even more critical when immigration is still actively promoted and idealized by much of the developing world. 

Meanwhile, not long ago, homesickness was still considered as a real disease. Nowadays, especially amid global turmoil, a forever home feels like an illusory neverland to many diaspora groups.  

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Charlotte Yao, “940905 Mom’s Thirtieth Year Portrait,” 2025, inkjet print photography and collage, 18" x 24" x 3" (photo courtesy of Canton-sardine)

On the second floor, the photo collage “Mom’s Thirtieth Year Portrait” is one of the few works that is not blurred. Through Photoshop and cosmetic styling, the artist reconstructs a portrait of her mother at age 30 out of Yao’s own portrait. 

Many of the artist’s friends who attended the opening didn’t realize the woman in the portrait was Yao herself, even though she had shared the creative process and included her mother’s original photo as a reference in the collage. 

The maternal bond, which, in the artist’s words, is “impossible to reconstruct,” appears to have been superficially restored through digital manipulation. This false overlap and uncanny resemblance, reinforced by viewers’ mistaken recognition, highlight the unbridgeable distance between Yao and her mother, despite efforts at reconciliation.

Memories torn to pieces. A late-night drive with no end in sight. A boundless web of familial wounds — rooted in the past yet stretching into the future — this is one of the distinct and lingering aches of the East Asian diaspora. ■

Charlotte Yao, Let’s Go to America, is on view until July 12, 2025 at Canton-sardine.

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