After Herculean efforts by Gu and his team, “Becoming Rivers” as well as the entire Border Zones exhibit is finally up and running. The final step was to install the boats outside and thicken up the indoor portion of the installation. The final product is visually stunning — two streams of boats seem to emerge from the ocean and pass through the walls of the MOA. These two rivers then join into one in front of a wall-sized painting of the Yangtze and Fraser Rivers as seen from satellite images. At the centre of the painting is the Pacific Ocean, but the continents have been pressed together, resulting in a turbulent strip of water that reminds me of a waterfall (see below).
The image of blue waterways – Gu describes the rivers and tributaries as being like veins in a body – is especially striking given the absence of water in the rest of the installation. Is a boat separated from its river like a fish out of the water? One of the questions that our team has been grappling with is the elusive meaning of water, the ways in which it functions simultaneously as an abstract concept (signified perhaps most prominently by the iconic formula H2O) as well as the most material everyday “object.”
At first glance, the boats imply the existence of an underlying waterway, but as one “immerses” oneself in the stream, they turn eerily into a metonymic reminder of the missing water. I found the experience of walking among boats outside the museum – as well as under the hundreds of suspended boats swaying in the gentle air flow of the museum – both jarring and peaceful. The flow of a river is one of the oldest metaphors for the flow of time, but there is something vaguely out-of-time about this installation.
A completely different idea came to me, though, as Gu, Jennifer, and I were walking through the outdoor installation at night. Boats and rivers carry a wide range of cultural meanings, but every few years in Canada, the image of racialized subjects from Asia arriving in boats evokes a kind of panic about unstoppable waves of migrants and renewed calls for tighter regulation of immigration. Indeed, the notion of the Yangtze joining into the Fraser and vice versa – while on one level a utopian vision of cultural interchange – is, on another level, implicated in fears about the Yellow Peril overrunning the settler colonies of British Columbia.
If we approach “Becoming Rivers” in this manner, then the installation turns into a reenactment of those fears (the boats aren’t just arriving our our shores, but they’re also crashing through the walls of our most cherished [educational] institutions!). Is it perhaps any surprise, that the boats look the same and interchangeable? But what is haunting is precisely their emptiness — they carry nothing, yet they signify much. Is “Becoming Rivers” a euphoric vision of cultural translation on a global scale or a critical encounter with a deeply entrenched racial imaginary?
I’ll leave it for other members of the team to comment — or any reader of this blog for that matter: please write in!For now, I’ll post a few more preview shots of “Becoming Rivers.”
