Canned Foreign
November 15 – December 3, 2019
Canned Foreign is a multimedia exhibition that features the work of four half-Japanese artists, responding to themes of identity, diaspora, queerness, and cultural heritage through their own subjective experiences. The exhibition’s name is borrowed from a short story by Tawada Yoko, a Japanese/German author who discusses the concept of “foreignness” in her work. Canned Foreign contemplates cultural in-betweenness, and the feelings that arise when one doesn’t quite feel at home in any part of the world.
Reiko Inouye is an interdisciplinary artist and 4th year undergraduate student at UBC, residing as an uninvited guest on the traditional, unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Her work often explores theories of defamiliarization, structures of social power, and performativity. She is experimental in medium, but currently is exploring facets of digital media, collage, writing, photography, and performance. Recently she has been researching concepts of displacement, queerness, and subversion in her work as it relates to identity and spatial navigation.
Rose Butch is a nisei haafu artist and your Premier Non-Binary Drag Thing whose style and sensibility follows the pursuit of gender euphoria. Rose flourished into the East Van drag scene in 2014 with their playful and theatrically-informed drag, which aims to bring non-binary visibility to stages across Vancouver and beyond.
Anne Canute is a multiracial multidisciplinary creator based on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. They are excited about digital storytelling, community based media, and intersecting arts with technology.
Yuko Fedrau is an interdisciplinary artist and a fifth-year art history student at UBC. In her research, she is interested in examining visual culture through a post-colonial and queer lens. She is excited about blending different mediums together and experimenting with how that can convey new narratives. She has been living and working on unceded Coast Salish territory for the past five years.
Canned Foreign is a project generously supported by the UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration (ACAM) Studies.
Accessibility:
Canned Foreign contains low lighting. More information about accessibility can be found on our About Page.