Love Intersections

In this installation, drag artist Maiden China performs an ancestral veneration ceremony at Vancouver’s Larwill Park, gathering site of the 1907 Anti-Oriental Chinatown (and Japantown) Riots as an exploration of temporality of anti-Asian racism in Canada.  Giving offerings to our ancestors, making reference to the history of racism we are connected to; and recognizing the implications that these histories of Chinatown have on our own complicated identities today, as queer and racialized subjects.  Abstracting from Saidiya Hartman’s notion of ‘temporal confusion’, the ceremony collapses linear temporal boundaries by reconfiguring our diasporic queerness from a spiritual, embodied, and historical perspective.  The floral borders on the windows reference the flower “bombing” from the anonymous artist who responded to the xenophobic grafitti in the neighbourhood with this generous symbol of resilience.


Lead Artists: Love Intersections (David Ng & Jen Sungshine)

Performance by Kendell Yan (Maiden China, Co-Director of Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny)

Illustrations by Shira Anisman and River Ironeagle

Project Coordinator: Marissa De Sandoli

Videography: Eric Sanderson and D'Arcy Hamilton