Announcing ECU’s 2023 Honorary Degree and Emily Award Recipients

Glenn Lewis was born in Chemainus, British Columbia in 1935. He studied at the Vancouver School of Art, graduating with an Honours degree in painting, drawing and ceramics in 1958. He then attended the University of British Columbia and earned a teaching degree in 1959. He continued his studies under Bernard Leach, the artist-potter in Cornwall, England from 1961 to 1963. Along with John Reeve and Warren MacKenzie he founded a pottery in 1964, Longlands in Hennock, Devon, but in the same year left to teach ceramics in the Education Faculty, 1964-67, and the Fine Arts Department, 1971-74, at the University of British Columbia with a break as Visiting Professor in 1970-71, to teach in undergraduate and masters programs, New York State College of Ceramics, Alfred University, Alfred, N.Y. Although an intensely important part of his artistic repertoire, his work with traditional pottery was replaced with an interest in the progressive avant-garde in the 1960s, with conceptual and performance art. Always questioning the dialectic between conventional objects and art, social obligation and natural instinct, function and wonder, his past experience with sculpture played an important role in his new projects, attempting to reunite art and craft that the ancient Greeks called “techne” because they didn’t have a term for “art.”

Much of his work between the 1960s and the 1980s included some aspect of sculpture or positioning as a questioning of the dichotomy between the static and the transient. He was fascinated with seeking commonality and human links revealed by conventional items and popular myth. He worked with photography, film, and even horticulture, becoming increasingly interested in nature, particularly topiary. He was involved in a number of artists’ collectives and artist-run centres, which included Intermedia, the New Era Social Club in 1968 and the Western Front in 1973 as one of its founders. Many of his works were collaborative and included members of these collectives, often questioning the perception of reality by a public manipulated by the media. New media in all types became the catalyst for much of his work through the 80s, an investigation into its power to influence and broadcast, and yet limit perception at the same time. He was awarded with 5 Canada Council grants throughout this period. His attention to new media eventually led to his appointment as Head of Media Arts at the Canada Council in 1987 until 1990. From 1993 to 2006 he built a plant nursery called Fragrant Flora on the Sunshine Coast and founded The Sunshine Coast Botanical Garden. All of this was an outgrowth of his photography in gardens around the world based on his research of the elements inherent in paradise myths. He was awarded the “Emily” award from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2000 and received the Governor General’s Award for Visual Arts in 2017.

An innovative first-generation conceptual mixed media artist, Lewis has worked with pottery, sculpture, performance, correspondence, photographs, video and installation since the early 1960s. The scope and intellectual pursuits of his work range across concept, fiction, myth and community concerns. He was one of the earliest innovators in performance art with “Flour Piece” 1968 at the VAG, and video performances, “Japanese Pickle” and “Blue Tape Around City Block”, both in 1969. Now, in 2023, he made a body of work: ceramic things used in photographs of still life that both speak to a history of painting and the actual things in still life.

Paul Wong is a media-maestro making art for site-specific spaces and screens of all sizes. He is an award-winning artist and curator known for pioneering early visual and media art in Canada, founding several artist-run groups, and organizing events, festivals, conferences and public interventions since the 1970s. Wong has produced projects throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

“Now in his 40th year as a creator of events, performances, videos, pictures, sculptures and cultural institutions, Wong has made himself a virtual intersection of activities both solo and collaborative, affirmative and critical, stoic and ludic.” – Michael Turner, Preview Magazine February/March 2019

Wong was the winner of the Bell Canada Award in Video Art 1992, the first recipient of the Transforming Art Award from the Asian Heritage Foundation 2002 and the inaugural winner of the Trailblazer Expressions Award in 2003, created by Heritage Canada, National Film Board and CHUM Limited. In 2005 he received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art. In 2008 was awarded Best Canadian Film or Video at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. In 2016, the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts.

Paul recently completed the multiyear interdisciplinary 身在唐人街/OCCUPYING CHINATOWN project. Inspired by hundreds of letters and familial artifacts of his late mother Suk Fong Wong, Paul Wong created intimate exhibitions, public art pieces, artist talks, events, workshops, and the website occupyingchinatown.com. 身在唐人街/OCCUPYING CHINATOWN was a public art project commissioned by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program in partnership with the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. The Occupying Chinatown book was a finalist for 2022 City of Vancouver Book Award.

Paul is a co-founding director of the Satellite Video Exchange Society (VIVO Media Arts Centre), now in its 50th year of operation. For the first 25 years, he was a driving force involved with making this a vibrant and important centre pioneering video art in Canada.

He is the Artistic Director and curator of On Main Gallery (On The Cutting Edge Productions Society). Established in 1986, Wong has facilitated hundreds of artists projects, most recently as the Producer and Artistic Director of the Pride in Chinatown festival 2018-2022. This annual event claims a safe space for Pan Asian queer communities to come together and celebrate being out loud and proud in Chinatown.

Zadie Xa (b.1983) draws upon her own background to inform an ongoing engagement with hybrid and diasporic identities, global histories, and folklore, as well as spiritual and religious rituals. She creates installations that incorporate painting, sculpture, textile, sound and performance. Xa’s art seeks to elevate narratives that have been erased and repressed by the West and occupying powers. For her, art is a means to analyze socio-political conditions and cultural behaviours through a lens of masquerade, play, costuming and storytelling.

Xa’s practice is highly collaborative, and she has developed ongoing exchanges with dancers, and musicians. Since 2006, Xa has worked closely with artist Benito Mayor Vallejo. Together they have staged live performance, moving-image events and installations. Zadie earned an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2014 and a BFA at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2007.

Recent solo exhibitions include: The Whitechapel Gallery (2023), The Box Plymouth (2022), Leeds Art Gallery (2021), Remai Modern (2020).

Group exhibitions and performances include: Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul (2023), Copenhagen Contemporary (2023), Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (2023) Jeju Biennale (2023), Somerset House (2023), Jessica Silverman Gallery San Francisco (2022), Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022), Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (2022), Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong (2022), Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (2022), National Gallery (2021), Castello di Rivoli (2021), Haus der Kunst (2021), Shanghai Biennale (2021), Frieze London (2020), AGO Toronto (2020), Art Night (2020), Venice Biennale (2019), Hayward Gallery (2018) and Serpentine Galleries (2018 & 2017).

Xa lives and works in London.