Claire Chun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation research examines the ways that Asian North American diasporic art and media critically engage issues of settler colonial and militarized imperial violence. Claire received a 2023 Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship to conduct fieldwork in Canada, examining how artists complicate notions of "Asianness" and grapple with the complexities of living and working in a settler-colonial society.
With support from the Canadian Studies Program, I conducted four weeks of fieldwork in Vancouver, British Columbia and Toronto, Ontario in Summer 2023 while also working towards developing a dissertation chapter on my ongoing research on Korean diasporic visual cultures. I traveled to Toronto and Vancouver to explore how Asian Canadian visual culture negotiates and is animated by histories of settler, imperial, and environmental violence alongside ongoing Indigenous sovereignty struggles.
Through archival research, place-based observations, and site visits, my field research in Canada thus set out to examine, in Iyko Day’s words, “whether it is possible to view Asian Canada as a social category that is part of a distinctly Canadian racial formation, one that cannot be seen through the US prism of race” (Day 2008). In other words, my research asks: What can Asian Canadian aesthetic practices teach us about the particularities of Canadian racial formation? And how might a critical interrogation of Canadian race-making histories interrupt Asian “settler moves to innocence” as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang put it (Tuck and Yang 2012)?
In order to begin answering these questions, I first traveled to Toronto where I viewed Korea-born and Vancouver-based artist Jin-me Yoon’s retrospective at The Image Centre which commemorated her 2023 Scotiabank Photography Award win. It was an incredibly significant and timely exhibition that shifted the very terms of my later fieldwork in Vancouver. At Yoon’s retrospective, I was able to view her monumental photographic portrait series, A Group of Sixty-Seven (1996) and other major works alongside new art. My viewing experience at The Image Centre was deeply informative as it allowed me to take stock of my own viewing reactions as well as that of other visitors who were also present in the gallery space. While in Toronto viewing Yoon’s exhibition on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, the Mississaugas, and the Wendat peoples, I meaningfully traced the ways that Yoon’s artistic career has been in long dialogue with histories of Asian settler colonialism. This participatory viewing experience significantly informed and shaped the field research I did in Vancouver in the following month of August.
After viewing Jin-me Yoon’s retrospective in Toronto, I revised the scope of my archive by narrowing my textual analysis to Yoon’s body of work. Through a trained focus on selected artworks, I heightened my attention to the place-based politics of her aesthetic practice. In Vancouver, I visited the Maplewood Flats Conservation Area located within the unceded territory of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, which is also at the center of Yoon’s recent works, including Dreaming Birds Know No Borders (2021) and Becoming Crane (Pacific Flyways) (2022). While there, I spent time walking along the trails, observing how the conservation area figures into the landscape in relation to the looming Burnaby Refinery, located right across Burrard Inlet in the city of Burnaby. I also spent time at the specific site of Yoon’s Becoming Crane photographic series because I felt it was important to experience Yoon’s work as an animating force where nature and the environment are collaborative actors and participants.
This trained focus on the place-based specificity of Yoon’s work heightened my attention to the cultural and ecological significance of Western Canada in shaping settler colonial frontier-building fantasies and tourism projects in the late nineteenth century. I followed this line of inquiry to the archives at the University of British Columbia where I viewed pre-war Canadian tourism materials. My research in the archives provided me with the historical context needed to comprehensively grapple with the stakes of Yoon’s work, specifically Souvenirs of the Self (1991), Long View (2017), and Testing Ground (2019), which directly address how the settler colonial logics of Canadian tourism obscure the ongoing transpacific violences that link the militarized geographies of Korea and Canada together.
With the generous support of the Canadian Studies Program, my field research in Toronto and Vancouver ultimately served as a major step not only in my methodological considerations of how to bring place-based fieldwork, archival research, and close readings of visual art together, but also in my critical exploration of how Asian Canadian artists grapple with histories of diasporic displacement and migration in relation to ongoing settler, imperial, and environmental contestations.