My earliest memory of encountering "real" art in Trinidad was in the work of Edwin Hingwan. He lived in Mayaro, where many an August family holiday was spent, and the story of his crippling disease that did not dampen the lightness of his watercolour brush on paper nor curb the joyful play of light and shade on coconut trees was a lesson in both aesthetics and human courage.Thus I was not surprised when the Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles extended an invitation to a research advisory meeting in September 2014 to roll out its project to connect the visual culture produced by Chinese and Chinese-descended artists in the Caribbean from the last century into this one.
The Chinese American Museum is researching and planning an exhibition of modern and contemporary work from artists from the Chinese diaspora communities of the Caribbean islands. The exhibition will open in 2017 and will show a selection of work at its gallery in Los Angeles.Trinidad was central to the streaming of Chinese to the new world, and to the Caribbean in particular, in the early 19th century. The earliest Chinese settlement in the Caribbean was in Trinidad, when 192 males were recruited to settle and work the sparsely populated island in 1806. The vast majority of the residents returned to China within three years, yet this movement was started a full 40 years before the larger-scale passage of contract labourers that would come into Cuba or California.Available statistics show that an estimated 225,000 Chinese "coolies" (mostly men) arrived in the Caribbean between 1847 and 1874.
Trinidad-born Edwin Hingwan was among the first artists in Trinidad painting in a field that had previously been dominated by Europeans on this side of the world. By the 1950s, other Chinese artists in Trinidad, among them Amy Leon Pang, Carlisle Chang and Sybil Atteck, would become indelible part of the history of art making in this society, although much of their repertoire, now classic artworks of this nation, has not been sufficiently exposed or perhaps appreciated other than in the works of curators such as Geoffrey MacLean.Yet their work has been important in shaping a sensibility of the Chinese in the west, as the Chinese American Museum project acknowledges. Leon Pang and Atteck, as well as other artists, were among those who, perhaps influenced by Cazabon, or by the centrality of Paris to art in the 20th century, travelled to Europe and worked with French masters of the Barbizon school in the avant garde studios that shaped the way in which they viewed the landscape and phenomena of Trinidad society differently.
The museum's research thus far has shown that artists such as Wifredo Lam (1902-1982), one of Cuba's most celebrated visual artists, Flora Fong Garcia (1949), another Cuban visual artist, Edouard Wah (1938-2003), a renowned Haitian painter, and Carlisle Chang (1921-2001), a T&T muralist, have all impacted Latin American art in the Caribbean.Lam's famous work (including The Jungle, which has influences of Picasso's cubist period) hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Carlisle Chang's masterpiece The Inherent Nobility of Man, a 40-by-15-foot mural in the arrival hall of the old Piarco Airport, painted in 1961, was demolished, much to the dismay of the public, when the airport building was extended. The piece was described by MacLean as "possibly the most important work of art in the Caribbean." Other Chang murals remain, such as Conquerabia, cast in cement outside the Port-of-Spain City Hall.
Whereas most of the existing literature on the Chinese in the region attempts to shed light on geopolitical history and identity of the Chinese communities, little has been written about the artistic contribution of past and contemporary Caribbean artists of Chinese descent to Caribbean art. This research will contribute to a new narrative and dialogue about the place of the multifaceted Chinese diaspora in Caribbean and Latino art.Within this new contextual narrative will feature an analysis of artists who are lesser known, such as Kathryn Chan of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at UWI, St Augustine, and a re-examination of known artists such as Wifredo Lam.
Chan, trained variously in New York and London, says about her piece Archipelago, "It's this constant obsession I have with 'home' with my love for my country but my feeling of hopelessness, that I can't seem to do anything to make it grow up fast, or make it understand itself quickly. It is a love for this country, this heritage." She draws her inspiration for this piece from the ideas expressed in Derek Walcott's Nobel lecture Fragment of the Antilles when he talks about the sentiments that lead to the reassembling of pieces of broken heritage to create another, not unlike putting back together the pieces of a broken vase.
From November 8-20, Steve Wong and Alexandra Chang will visit T&T, Panama and Jamaica to meet with artists and curators who are in these societies. Heading this Getty-funded project are Steve Wong, curator of the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles, and Alexandra Chang. Chang, who will be carrying out the primary research on the artists and curators, is the director of public programs and research manager at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute research center at New York University.I and Dr Wally Look Lai, well-known scholar in Chinese history, are both research advisers on this project and will assist them in their research while in the region.
�2 Patricia Mohammed is professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at UWI, St Augustine.
