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179 With regard particularly to the rituals involving fire, incense and walking the mountain, I remark to Paul Wong that the danger of exotification veers perilously close. In the context of performance art, with its Eurocentric basis, the threat is very real. Who is this for? Both within a Eurocentric practice and outside of it, we have a need to incorporate Asian practices at the same time as altering them to suit the situation, at the same time as protecting them. To bring our own family practices to our new home, within white mainstream institutions, reclaims that space. But in a context in which we and our practices have been exoticized, appropriated, mystified and misrepresented, we still have to worry about how that work may be read. —Larissa Lai1 L arissa Lai presciently evokes the conundrum of autoethnography in this analysis of Paul Wong’s Chinaman’s Peak: Walking the Mountain, which he created for As Public as Race at the Walter Phillips Gallery of the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1992.2 As Public as Race was a three-part exhibition series that reflected upon the possibilities of official multiculturalism after the ratification of the Multiculturalism Act in 1988, buoyed by the optimism of having difference newly entrenched in the nation’s statutes. Each of the artists—Margo Kane, James Luna, and Paul Wong—were invited by curator Sylvie Gilbert to create work reflecting on race, identity, and stereotype, “commenting in different ways on a society largely blind not only to racist attitudes, but non-white cultural practices in general … creat[ing] powerful precedents that enable distinctive practices to emerge and flourish.”3 Kane’s work, Memories Springing/Waters Singing, Luna’s Indian Legends, and Wong’s Chinaman’s Peak: Walking the Mountain all [chapter eight] Ken Lum, Paul Wong, and the Aesthetics of Pluralism Ming Tiampo worked to subvert cultural stereotypes, reclaiming their own cultural voices and the right to represent themselves. Wong’s work, Chinaman’s Peak: Walking the Mountain, was an installation , video, and performance piece that developed out of a longer featurelength video called Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade (1988) that the artist produced after returning from an extended voyage in China. The culmination of a period of discovery and reunification of family, language, and culture that began only in 1982, Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade and Chinaman’s Peak: Walking the Mountain were exercises in recovery. In his own words, they were an attempt to “recover the lost histories and tend the gravestones left untended for decades.”4 In the performance Chinaman ’s Peak, Wong swept gravesites, lit candles, and paid respect to the spirits of Chinese pioneers, allowing the incense smoke to fill the spaces left empty by mainstream discourse. Wong filled the gap with a palimpsest of memory that layered the commemoration of his father, Chinese railway workers, and the forgotten history of Chinaman’s Peak, a mountain so named in 1980 in honour of a Chinese cook who climbed the peak in 1896, whose name, Ha Ling, was not restored until 1997. Wong also filled these silent margins with the memory of friends and lovers who had committed suicide, Paul Speed and Kenneth Fletcher. Reclaiming stories of the past and rebuilding histories that were assimilated , obscured, and marginalized through (auto)biographical and autoethnographic narratives was an important first step in cultural race politics that mirrored the consciousness raising of first-wave feminism. The priority was then, as Wong declared in the catalogue for the 1991 exhibition Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, to be “first seen and heard.”5 However, as Lai points out, when the fragrant streams of incense smoke found their way into “white mainstream institutions,”6 these voices risked being received as radically other, as exoticism staged for the consumption of audiences in search of the new. Indeed, when other voices first entered into a white discursive field, they were in danger of being perceived as exotic, as excitingly strange. Although first-wave cultural race politics may have eschewed the centre for this very reason, creating safe spaces on the margins where those narratives would not be misunderstood or co-opted, I would argue that the task before us now is more radical: to challenge the very existence of “white mainstream institutions.” Not only must racialized identities be retheorized , but so must what Lai referred to as the “white mainstream.” In other words, rather than making circumscribed interventions, insertions, and recoveries, it is essential to disassociate the terms “white” and “mainstream ,” refiguring...

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