Last spring, an Economist article declared Vienna, Geneva, and Vancouver to be “mind-numbingly boring” cities. The concept is well worn. The author of the article doesn’t claim to be making some grand statement on Vancouver. Nonetheless, Vancouverites responded explosively. A lot rests on our city being desirable. There’s a looming sense that somehow this matters. Even in local artistic communities, defined by a sort of rejection of the placid kind of fun that Vancouver offers, musicians and artists and label-heads are quick to reject the title “No Fun City.”
Category Archive: Art & Culture
Julia Kwan’s new documentary is contentious not in its lack of sincerity, but in an absence of on-screen controversy.
Last week Vancouver was immersed in smoke from forest fires across Northern and Southern British Columbia. The smoke seemed to speak, without speaking, about our present uneasy condition. On this occasion, The Mainlander has decided to publish the long-delayed online version of a small chapbook, ‘Five Images of a City Without Buildings,’ originally published in 2012 by the artist collective coupe.
Model Minority is a publication assembled by Gendai, a non-profit visual arts organization that engages the East Asian diasporic community in Canada. This volume is a collection of research in the form of essays, articles, and commissioned artist projects that broach the subject of “model minority” in North America. By combining artists projects with archival material, academic research and recent political activities, the book investigates a territory usually given exclusively to social sciences.