Jinny Yu

JY My practice has been primarily painting self-portraits in the extended sense of the term, and by that, I mean trying to understand the world around me and my being in it. In 2017, when Canada celebrated its 150th anniversary, I was deeply affected by its problematic nature and was prompted to reflect on my positionality as a first-generation settler (a term I borrow from Amy’s book, and whose use I am still thinking about after my initial conversation with David, who, if I understood correctly, finds it problematic when used by people who do not embrace the political—and otherwise—positions of settlers) who lives and works on the traditional, unceded territories of the Algonquin nation, Anishinaabe/Omàmiwininìwag territory.

Perpetual Guest is the first part of what I feel will be a large and long-term project, trying to understand what it means for me to live and work on this Indigenous land, and how I can decolonize my way of thinking, being and making (short of literally decolonizing—i.e. leaving this land, the way Eve Tuck suggests in her article “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”) I feel this under- standing is essential to my ongoing practice and particularly, to my life. This project will keep developing as I continue to learn from conversations, introspection and research.

I position myself as a first-generation settler and I use Perpetual Guest to explore what this position might mean for someone like myself who is a Korean immigrant living on Indigenous land. How do you position yourself? Could you elaborate on how your positionality affects your way of being and living? What are your thoughts on my self-identification as a settler immigrant?

AF I think identifying as a “settler immigrant” is and will continue to be a fraught position. I do it myself, but that doesn’t mean I expect other people to agree with me, but speaking for myself only, it’s the closest summation that I have found so far. I find it better than the other options, which include “Asian- Canadian,” “newcomer,” or just plain “Canadian” or “immigrant”. Language has its limits, but we understand ourselves and each other through the parameters of shared language. I don’t think a name should be the end of a conversation, it should always be a beginning. “Settler” is also very charged, for a lot of different people for very different reasons, but I include it because I am complicit in upholding ongoing settler colonial laws. There is also a difference between “settlers” and “immigrants” in how they navigate the land they enter, with the former planting their flag, so to speak, and the latter knowing they need to learn the ways of their new homeland. But at this point in time, when I look around and see how racialized people, specifically Asians, are perpetuating the violence of white supremacy, I think we need more critical thought around what it means to be both an immigrant and a settler.

DG Hello, Amy and Jinny. Thank you for the invitation to this conversation. I identify as Métis. Which is to say that I belong to a People who are recognized by the Canadian Constitu- tion, along with First Nations and Inuit people, as Indigenous. However, while Métis are Indigenous—a People existing in Northern Turtle Island before confederation; a People who recognize themselves as belonging to this territory and are neither First Nations nor European, and are so recognized by First Nations and settler people - many, like me, are white pre- senting, and in most situations enjoy unearned white privilege. My Dad’s side is Métis. My mother’s side is European settler. I am implicated in both streams.

Yes, words are difficult and meanings shift. I recognize as colonial persons those who espouse colonial views and performances, wherever they are from. Decolonization is the effort to challenge and displace those worldviews and actions. Colonists come from Britain, and sometimes France and occasionally other places, and see themselves as representing those places here, acting as agents of those states. Settlers have separated themselves from other states and, acting as individuals and families, choose to settle here. Slaves and their descendants are neither colonists nor settlers. [Although, last week, at a symposium in Banff, I met a descendant of slaves, and she and her family strongly identify as settlers. No longer enslaved, her ancestors left the South, moved to Nebraska and knowingly occupied territory from which Indigenous people were removed.]

‘Settler’ suggests staking a claim to territory; settling in. Many so-called settlers are on the move and travel lightly, not quite homing, not quite claiming territory as theirs and reshaping land in their own image. Others have made good relations with the local First Nations, Inuit or Métis, even inter- married. Are they settlers? There is such a range and variety. Immigrants who make good relations with Indigenous peoples of the territories they share are guests.

JY Your comments bring on many complicated entanglements, and I’d like to raise a few here.

My family was invited and welcomed to settle here by Canada, not by Indigenous peoples. I self-identify as a settler immigrant out of my complicity in the colonial project that is multicultural Canada, and also out of a sense of responsibility towards collective and historical violence done and still being done to the Indigenous peoples by colonialism. I also recog- nize how a large part of my way of thinking had been shaped by colonialism.

That said, I agree the term ‘settler’ is fraught and unstable, as both of you point out. Perpetual Guest is often how I feel, not only on this land in particular but on this earth in general. This is a state that I came to accept and appreciate after many years of struggling through a feeling of non- and un-belonging. This state of guest-hood is also often praised by philosophers (Said, Arendt, Adorno, just to name a few) and I also believe it to be an important position to hold, particularly now, when we have entered a period of heightened nationalism globally.

However, the part of guest-hood that makes me feel a bit uneasy is when it comes to taking responsibility, as I wonder if this sojourner mentality by definition brings with it a diminished expectation of responsibility when compared to a settler mentality. The sense of belonging, I find, often leads to a stronger sense of responsibility. Would a settler, for example, who truly belongs and cares, exercise responsibility towards the land together with Indigenous peoples, and not only extract resources from it? Or would a proper sense of respect from a guest be better/enough? Should a Perpetual Guest adopt a sense of belonging?

AF I want to go back for a minute to something David said and maybe this is what you’re picking up on, Jinny, that this idea of being a “guest” is hard to feel when you’ve spent more than half your life adopting and actively learning colonial attitudes to fit into a place where you’ve always felt like you could never belong. To partake so readily in the settler men- tality, even if you were always treated as other, is a shame and guilt that I know I had to privately process. But shame stops being productive, especially in East Asian culture, where I know shame can be very internal and intense. So how do you move from shame into being a good guest to the lands you are on, and on the substrate, can you be a good guest and a good Canadian citizen?

Just to be clear, I don’t know if I am a guest, or if I am trying to be one. I think to be a guest is an ongoing position with ongoing duties. But Jinny, is your uneasiness and sense of belonging and un-belonging tied to a certain anxiety in how to be a guest/how to live here in this country in a more “honest” way? I am quoting “honest” as I want to ask what that word means to each of you?

DG I am grateful to read your sincere struggles with these ideas/positions. Jinny, you say that you and yours were wel- comed to Canada as a guest by non-Indigenous hosts. Could you now choose to recognize the Indigenous keepers of the land you reside with as your hosts? Such a recognition empowers you both. Such a petition is your recognition of the truth of Indigenous stewardship and realigns your relations to that territory and its keepers. Another way to home here is to have a relationship with the land that is recognized by Indigenous people as “honest”, that is, in accord with Indigenous worldviews.

I belong to the Métis Nation and was born into a social contract with Canada. I am a dual citizen. I experience both as facts but their meanings are a matter of perpetual negotiation. I don’t fully understand your feelings of shame. Is it in the sense of an “original sin” that you inherited? That seems designed to keep those in its thrall frozen. It seems to me that shame is productive when it is for something we actively did or did not do, and is followed by remedial action.

We have in common the desire for and inhabitation of art as a third space.

JY I would like to think that my family was welcomed (though uninvited) by the Indigenous hosts, on whose land we live. However, I am reluctant to claim so, as we were not officially welcomed by Indigenous hosts and I want to be extremely careful, and not assume anything. This cautious position is related to my uneasiness when thinking about the state of being a Perpetual Guest: while the state of being insecure may lead to being a very good guest, I wonder if it may also lead to a position of unproductive passivity that leads in not actively sharing responsibilities.

On shame, I agree with Amy that it is unproductive in and of itself, and I agree with David that it can sometimes act as a trigger leading for one to start looking for remedial actions. This was certainly my case. Now, where that sense of shame comes from might require more fundamental soul searching, but in this context, I can say that it came from (un)knowingly having taken part in a worldview shaped by colonists. I like how Amy, you coined the term “willful ignorance” in your book “Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being.”

Amy, your question of whether one can be a good guest and a good Canadian citizen, is right on point and it is refreshing to think that those two qualities may not be mutually exclu- sive. I understand what David calls “a third space” is akin to this. This would suit me just fine and I am definitely invested in the “inhabitation of art as a third space,” but I wonder if I can assume that it would also be a position acceptable to my hosts? After all, as a guest on this land, a new space is where I would feel comfortable. But what about the hosts, who might be just fine with a first or second space? Why would the hosts want a third space? Who am I, to work out a third space? What would this third space look like?

I am still looking for what the “honest” way of living on this land is and means, but I have a feeling that it may take some time...

AF So, this may be a tangent, but just moved to Ottawa, a place I have never lived, but visited on various occasions. In the last few years, I have learned about Ottawa as a city and capital founded on unceded Algonquin territory. I didn’t know what that really meant, and I am still definitely just scratching the surface. I think part of living in a place is to learn about it and how it became that way.

Driving in and out of the city, I can see the geology of the highway’s cut rocks reveal a completely different place to Southern Ontario, where I’ve been living for the past 5 years. Knowledge is always relative to what you already know. I was told one of the highways out of Ottawa hold some significance as one of the largest clearings in Canadian history. This history and the veracity of these kinds of stories is something I know will take some time to learn, check, and absorb, but so far, I have been spending the majority of time along the Kitchissippi. I was admiring the river from a friend’s car when she very casually said that she doesn’t refer to it as the Ottawa river anymore, but the Kitschissippi. It was the first time I really heard that word. Now, walking and biking along the river trail system, I am noticing the different species of wild flowers and trees that thrive here.

Around the same time I moved here, a good friend of mine was spending some extended time down in St. Louis. He would send me photos on his phone of the Mississippi. Looking up the origin of both rivers’ names, a quick glance reveals each of their etymology as the “Great river,” in Algonquin and Ojibwe. I then looked up that both groups of people are related and identified as Anishinaabe, but that the Algonquins are not part of the Council of Three Fires. I had heard that Anishinaabe and Ojibwe were interchangeable names for the same group of people, but this was inaccurate. I have a lot more to read and learn and a lot more mistakes to likely make, but I know more now than before, and that’s all thanks to becoming interested in the river. Looking at a map, I was surprised to see that the river is also supposed to be a border between Ontario and Quebec, but that line feels very loose here and that interests me.

JY Welcome to Ottawa Amy! As I say welcome, I wonder if I am entitled to even say this as a guest. But perhaps I can, if I take David’s notion of “homing without settling” and the “desire to home in these territories without trying to settle them.” In your paper “Migration as Territory: Performing Domain with a Non-colonial Aesthetic Attitude,” you also say:

At some point, settlers identify less with where they, or their ancestors, are from and feel themselves to be native to Native territory. This feeling is subjective, mostly self-serving, and a psychological necessity. If it is to be more than a feeling, then the claim has to be recognized by others. If is it to be a non-colonial feeling of being and belonging, a relationship, then those others will include the Indigenous keepers of that territory with whom they negotiate sharing these places. Such being and recogni- tion is relational rather than a one-time pass.

David, is this how you see a “third space” shaping, with con- tinuous “conciliatory attitude” as you mention in your paper “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing”? May I ask you to elaborate a bit on that for those who haven’t read your paper? In the first paper, David, you say:

But what of recent migrants, folks who adopt the burden of Canadian citizenship; are they Settlers in the same sense? If they accept and inhabit the Canadian myth and assume the benefits of Indigenous dispossession, then, yes, they are Settlers. Are there alternatives? At least from the Indigenous perspective, the point of the Treaties was to share territory. The Indigenous signers could not have anticipated that the colonists had such a radically different sense of territory as property. To be a Settler is to see and use land as commodity. To embody territory as Indigenous people do, to co-habit space in our ways with us, is not to settle the land, to impose a will upon it that does not arise from territory or the customs of its Indigenous stewards, it is to settle oneself, accom- modating one’s self to territory not your own.

Amy, what are your thoughts on David’s definition of the word “Settler”? Should we be using another term to define ourselves? Or is “settler” with a small “s” how we should define ourselves?

AF I agree with David’s sentence, “To be a Settler is to see and use land as commodity.” I know I live in settler culture, under a settler government, operating through settler laws. Even indirectly, I am benefiting greatly through the use and land as commodity by the country’s leading industries, which are based in extractive economies. To be critical of one’s identity doesn’t negate its being. I am not something else just because being a settler Asian Canadian is problematic in its dispossession of Indigenous rights and land. I have said elsewhere I believe this country will not be at peace until these lands are given back to Indigenous nations to steward forward. I have also said elsewhere that I think racialized immigrants need to consider what it means to assimilate into a national narrative that erases Indigenous history and marginalizes all non-white citizens.

So, I am less occupied with naming and defining myself as a “settler” or “Settler”. For research purposes, I have said I am a settler immigrant, but I know this will mean different things to different people. I also want to correct something you said earlier, Jinny, about “willful ignorance.” I did not coin that term. I don’t know who did, or if it’s just a phrase that I have heard many times.

I can say my sense of understanding whose land I am on fluctuates depending on where I am. Growing up in Alberta, spe- cifically on Treaty 6 territory, where everywhere but Edmonton just voted for oil and gas once again, the conversation around land rights is say, very different than when I lived in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territor- ies. This difference could just be subjective, but now that I am living on unceded territories again after five years in downtown Toronto (which with respect to all of the connections and people who live there, I felt was a non-place), I do feel once again that the responsibility of knowing where one lives, on whose land one lives, is different whether you live on Treaty lands (and if I may say, from where David is writing and living and painting) or unceded lands.

DG I appreciate your thoughtful words about your relations to your territories and its peoples. It models the work we all need to do to get through this slow crisis. The last two weeks have taken me to elders in Edmonton and the Stoney Reserve (Banff). We’ve been talking, especially about the spirit and intent of the Treaties, which is not about the return of all the land to Indigenous people—though the return of a great deal of it, and stewardship responsibilities—but about sharing. I’m not in the camp of those who argue that the land was stolen. I agree that agreements have yet to be fully honored.

Perhaps we could return to your art, Jinny. How does your title and these above thoughts and feelings manifest in the work? How are they read there?

JY I look forward to an in-depth discussion when you see my work in person in November, but for now, I can say that the work of Perpetual Guest is visualizing my own feeling of unease and cautiousness coming from the implicit complicity of a settler immigrant. Malaise of the colonized land that looks at me, the land I live on and occupy through Canadian multicul- tural policy. It is a personal perspective—how I’ve come to feel about living on this unceded land. Tension between the sense of belonging (which I believe can lead to a positive sense of responsibility,) and sense of non- and/or un-belonging (which, though a desirable state, may lead to exemption from collect- ive and historic responsibility).

In this work, I use horizontality as opposed to the usual verticality of painting. The works are painted vertically but presented horizontally, parallel to the floor. The painted sheets of glass are connected to, propped up and/or supported by the eyes, pipes, and/or cylinders. I wanted to make physical the awareness of the unceded land on which the exhibition is taking place, I live and occupy. In a way, this is another self-por- trait as I reflect on being in my environment and present how I feel, rather than proposing a concrete solution. Thinking through my state of being and expressing it is something I think art can do.

As I make this work and as this conversation develops, I am learning about the notion of sharing as described by David. I’d like to think through what that could mean for people like me.

AF As I read your descriptions, Jinny, I am learning about your influences, which encompasses both an awareness of your body belonging/not belonging in space as in land and territory, and also spatial relations through the Western history of paint- ing. I can relate in terms of trying to find bridges inside myself between my formal training in English (otherwise known as canonized Eurocentric) literature and what I’ve had to find out for myself. It’s an uneven bridge as one history, the dominant history, is built on the specific exclusions and oppression of other histories. I think unraveling those histories has become increasingly important to me, in and out of the art world. As a critic and curator, I found myself increasingly asking the question of “What can art do?” and I wonder if you are grappling with similar thoughts, or if you have any elucidations, please do share them.

JY “What can art do?” was a question I did ask myself many times, but that seems to have shifted to “what can I do through art?” as I began to realize how art was a way for me to work through problems and change my way of thinking and being. Increasingly, I seem to want to focus on individualized and localized experiences and find meaning in relational connections rather than trying to achieve grand aim, as I once espoused.

How do you two see the relationship between art and the world? Do you think art can be used as a means to form new solidarities beyond identity politics?

DG I can’t wait to experience the work. I continue to know that visual and haptic art works quite differently than language, and am humble before the object. I hope to be transported, altered in ways you suggest. At least, have some sense of your relations through the material. That said, having grown up in Edmonton during the hyper-masculinist formalist reign, I remain suspicious of non-objective art. Worried about the gap between claimed intent and actual reception, especially when the intent is so specific and weighty. I don’t think there is such a thing as non-representational Indigenous art. Can your self-representation be experienced by others without the textual/verbal prompt? Is there a need not to represent more directly?

Such good questions. I certainly share similar struggles. I did an MA in American literature, and I love so much about European painting. I’m probably too assimilated to resist playing within its borders. I do see some eddies in the mainstream of both traditions, third spaces in which one can swirl and play, contemplate rather than progress, or “achieve a grand aim.” I suppose achievement is relative. I have some sentences and a few paintings that continue to give me great satis- faction--some of my own! Art can never know/capture its current self or limits. Ask anyone to define art. No one will be satisfied by the definition. When a theory seems to capture it, art changes to defeat the cage. It is almost nothing in itself. It is always pretending to be something else. Is art then political or playing at/about/with the political?

JY Thanks David for your questions, which I also have asked myself in the past and which I ask still, from time to time. I see my art practice as self-portraiture, that is, as a way to understand my being in this world and to understand the world around me. I see the specific questions around my state of being a Perpetual Guest as a conversation with my artwork/ art practice, rather than seeing my artwork as representing those ideas. In the studio, I like when ideas and practice con- verse with each other and prompt different directions and questions to each other. I consider painting a material-based medium, as object, rather than image. In other words, I don’t conceptualize painting as existing between representation and non-representation/abstraction, but appreciate the meanings its materiality conveys.

I think art and politics interact to produce new spaces, thoughts and way of being, but I don’t think of them as occu- pying the same function in our society. There are more dimen- sions in art than political and vice versa.

I have been educated in European and American paint- ing tradition, with some understanding of Korean traditional painting philosophy, which I find more holistic, and which I think also lead me to conceptualize painting the way I do now. I’d love to hear more about how you see the impossibility of non-representational Indigenous art.

AF I will admit to perpetually asking and trying to answer “what is art?” throughout my twenties. Back then, as someone who wrote about art on a weekly basis (in that modernist hang- over known as Edmonton in the 2000s), I had the opportunity to challenge what art was (i.e. pure abstraction) and had been heavily guarded and defined as for decades all because of Clement Greenberg and a legacy of white male artists that fol- lowed. In my weekly arguments that took the shape of reviews and columns about issues beyond visual art, I was striving to argue that art existed beyond form, that art was another measure of communication, and at its best, able to offer another entry point into our human existence from another person’s perspective. Maybe studying literature instilled in me that art is an extension of its socio-political time, that its pol- itics and aesthetics are derived from responding to the world as it was. But in the last decade or so, where we increasingly live in globalized newsfeeds and hyper neoliberalism, I have turned away from most art as it feels overwhelming, and not in a good way.

But I’ll say this: art is always a form of politics, even to those modernists. Just as people say they are “apolitical,” they are just demonstrating they have the privilege of being so. Art is a direct action of its maker, so thank you for making this art and opening up the opportunity for us to have this conversation!

DG I’ve watched as art world spaces—galleries, museums, temporary sites, books, magazines, studio, etc.—have been infiltrated by non-white, straight, male, and ‘old stock’(!) artists. I appreciate, Jinny, that at least one aspect of your work is about occupying these spaces (temporarily), and then being concerned about how you take up such space, especially now that you recognize it as also being Indigenous. Perhaps that is why you use the parallel or hovering strategy—having more space but less footprint. The temporary nature of such occu- pation, visiting, rhymes with Indigenous modes of being—at least on the Plains. I wonder about the oxymoronic positioning of the Perpetual Guest. The phrase seems to desire a space of suspense between permanence and passing through. What does it feel like to live this way? Perhaps it’s the only tenable philosophy, given our mortality. We all desire a durable relation with where we are, but our stay is temporary.

Amy Fung is a writer and organizer working across intersections of histories and identities. She is currently a Doctoral student at Carleton University and received her Master’s in English and Film Studies from the University of Alberta in 2009 with a specialization in criticism, poetics, and the moving image. Her writings have been commissioned and published by festivals, museums, and publications nationally and internationally. Her first book, Before I was a Critic, I was a Human Being addresses Canada’s mythologies of multiculturalism and settler colo- nialism through the lens of a national art critic (Artspeak and Book*hug 2019).

David Garneau is a Métis Visual Arts Professor at the University of Regina. His practice includes painting, curation, and criti- cal writing. He recently co-curated, with Kathleen Ash Milby, Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound, National Museum of the American Indian, New York; Moving Forward, Never Forgetting, with Michelle LaVallee, an exhibition concerning the legacies of Indian Residential Schools, other forms of aggressive assi- milation, and (re)conciliation, at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina; and With Secrecy and Despatch, with Tess Allas, an international exhibition about massacres of Indigenous people, and their memorialization, for the Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney, Australia. Garneau has recently given keynote talks in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and throughout Canada. He is part of a five-year, SSHRC funded, curatorial research project, Creative Conciliation; Sensory Entanglements, an Australia/Canada, SSHRC-funded creative research project; and is working on the Tawatina Bridge project, a large public art work for the City of Edmonton. His paintings are in numerous public and private collections.