Vancouver Heritage Foundation is a registered charity supporting the conservation of heritage buildings and structures in recognition of their contribution to the city’s economy, sustainability and culture.

Nellie Yip Quong and neighbourhood children (?) photo courtesy of Mrs. Eleanor (Yip) Lum collection.

Our city’s early history is full of  hardships, busts, booms, fiery destruction and rapid reconstruction. It is also a place where people from all over the world came to build a new life. In celebration of Asian Heritage Month, Vancouver Heritage Foundation‘s Places That Matter plaque project is honouring a love story and an advocate, in a non-Chinese woman who really mattered to the Vancouver Chinatown community. Some say very few people in the community mattered more than Mrs. Nellie Yip Quong (nee Towers)…

“Nellie Towers of St. John, NB met Charlie Yip Quong while teaching in New York. Married in 1900, the couple moved into the Yip Sang family compound in Chinatown in 1904. A feminist and social activist, “Granny” spoke five dialects and became a bold and outspoken advocate for her adopted community. In 1917, Charlie and Nellie moved to 783 East Pender Street and it was here that Nellie served as a trusted and well respected midwife to some 500 Chinese Canadian women.”

At the beginning stages of contacting Nellie Yip’s family and the current owners of the house, we knew we had an amazing story on our hands and wanted to be sure we could share it with a wider audience. Dr. Henry Yu, of UBC’s Chinese Canadian Stories project, was the person to contact. With amazing support from CCS and the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC, we were able to get the UBC student film crew to make a short about the house, the history, and the family! Check out the video here. It’s awesome! There’s also a research diary blog post by Janet Tse.

All this leads us to the plaque presentation taking place this Saturday May 25 at 2pm at the former house of Charlie and Nellie Yip. Eleanor  (daughter) and Starlet (granddaughter) Lum will be in attendance, as well as Aunt #18 Molly, the only living offspring of Yip Sang’s 23 children. Aunt Molly was delivered by Nellie Yip.  Other special guests,  Jim Wong-Chu, Larry Wong, and James Johnstone will be in attendance and our Places That Matter bike tour group will stop by with historian  John Atkin at the helm. Below is the invitation the presentation, as well as a lovely note we received. Please RSVP to  jessica@vancouverheritagefoundation.org  if you would like to join us!

Mrs. Eleanor (Yip) Lum in front of the house on East Pender. Courtesy of Mrs. Eleanor (Yip) Lum Collection

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THE OPENING is all about delving into the fascinating, quirky and wonderful visual arts in Vancouver. Each week we’ll feature an artist, cover an exhibition, discuss a lecture and everything else in-between to delve deep into who and what makes art happen!

Collector-turned-gallerist Wil Aballe is many things: a coma survivor and a patron of the arts rank high among his more eccentric titles. Most of all, however, he is a problem-solver.  ”I found I was hanging out in so many artists’ studios and thinking, this work is really good, how come I’m not seeing it in any shows? I kept on seeing a lot of work that has never been in an exhibition, and spaces kept on closing,” Aballe recalls in his usual good-natured manner.

His gallery, Wil Aballe Art Projects, is operated straight out of his own home. It’s a unique concept in our city, though it’s definitely not a one-off phenomenon: galleries such as Yactac and Lee Plested’s The Apartment have also found success with this model. For Aballe, it was not just an obvious solution in a city where the real estate market often prices galleries right out of business. It was also a way to connect potential buyers with the ability to see themselves living with the art on their own walls, in their own homes.

“Matthew and I were hanging out in this place,” he says, gesturing towards his brightly-lit, immaculately clean one-bedroom apartment. “And I was thinking, what if I turned my apartment into an exhibition space? It’s small, but the walls are good. Do you think people would show up and start to take it seriously?”

Though he humbly defines his initial presence in the Vancouver scene as that of a “casual art-goer”, since arriving in the city six years ago, he has built a formidable collection of works by emerging artists that is centred around his keenly-defined taste and knack for sussing out new talent. Marina Roy and Natasha McHardy’s Shell Game, which opens tonight, certainly doesn’t break from the pattern of high-quality exhibitions that have been cycling through Aballe’s living space since the gallery opened its doors in January this year, though it does deviate from Aballe’s inclination towards abstract painting.

“I have to say that the program for this year was so largely abstract, when I first thought about it in the fall, I showed somebody and they said, you’re going to be known as the abstract gallery!” Aballe recounts. “And I asked, is that bad? It’s what a lot of kids are doing in Vancouver nowadays. But he said, people will be going in with a perception that no matter what, you are going to be showing abstract art.”

“That’s why you brought us in,” jokes McHardy.

Having lived in the same building for years, you could say that Marina Roy and Natasha McHardy have been collaborating long before becoming the artistic duo Roy & McHardy in 2003. “We’re basically sisters,” McHardy says, chalking up a lot of thematic similarities in their work to a closeness in their friendship that has allowed for near-constant discussion of art in the context of the rest of their lives. “We even took Portuguese together, which wasn’t such a good idea.”

It’s easy to see how McHardy’s and Roy’s lively dialogue found its way into the video works that defined their collaborative efforts for several years, which were always centred around power structures, gender roles, and theatricality with a slapstick, D.I.Y. spirit. However different these video productions were from either of their independent practices, the parallels that run beneath their current bodies of work remain clear— a surprise, even, to both artists after they saw their work hung together for the first time.

“In a way, you’re creating the sets, and I’m creating the things within the sets — the characters that are interchangeable within them,” Roy points out.

Shell Game marks the inaugural exhibition of Marina Roy and Natasha McHardy together, not as Roy & McHardy, but as two independent artists. For all their similarities, their works are also starkly contrasted against each other. Where McHardy uses richly coloured materials to create warm, but emptied, environments, Roy mines a naive drawing aesthetic to create crinkled vellum sheets packed with objects and characters sourced from an encyclopedic image archive.

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Our friends at TELUS just dropped off a brand new BlackBerry Q10 smartphone at our office and here’s the thing: we want you to have it!

To enter to win all you have to do is show us a photo of the phone you’re using now. Maybe it’s an old flip phone, maybe it’s piece of junk or even a fancy smartphone… whatever it is we want to see it!

Tweet your photo to us at @VIAwesome using the hashtag #VIABB10 or email it to us at contact@vancouverisawesome.com. On Thursday, May 30th we’ll be doing a random draw for the winner.

Click HERE to learn more about this latest smartphone from BlackBerry. It’s worth $700 and there’s no strings/contract/anything attached for our winner. Good luck!

Have you been following Jason Statler’s At Your Convenience photo series here on the blog? Wondering where it came from and what the goal is? Have a read through THIS INTERVIEW that Cheryl Chan did with Jason and which The Province published today. It’s also in the printed edition, so pick up a copy and check out page A8!

Also, I’d like to note that in the piece it says that I came up with the concept for the series, which isn’t 100% true. Former V.I.A. editor, Jesse Oye, came up with it years ago; I simply got the ball rolling and put it into action with Jason.

Our friends at the landscape architecture firm PWL Partnership just released this beautiful short that looks at some of their projects they’ve worked on from Yaletown to Coal Harbour, Granville Street to the Village on False Creek, and all the way to New Westminster. As a resident of Vancouver I imagine you’ve probably been to every one of the spaces featured below. Have a poke around their WEBSITE to get some insight into how they came to be, and how they work.

Video produced by New Street Productions, led by Jon Long with music composed by Ben MacDougall.