Sunday, May 4, 2025
2:30PM | Doors @ 2:00PM
Entrance by donation, limited seating
360 Riot Walk + White Riot: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver
Henry Tsang in conversation with Marisa Alps
360 Riot Walk information + tour: https://360riotwalk.ca
Combining text, video and walking, White Riot: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver explores the conditions leading up to and the impact of a demonstration and parade in Vancouver, Canada, organized by the Asiatic Exclusion League and the ensuing mob attack on the city’s Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian communities. Emblematic of a systemically racist era, White Riot reveals the social and political environment of the time, when racialized communities were targeted through legislated as well as physical acts of exclusion and violence.
Based on 360 Riot Walk, a 360-degree video walking tour by artist and author Henry Tsang, White Riot offers an intersectional approach to this pivotal moment in the history of racialized communities and a cultural and social context for understanding for the current wave of anti-Asian sentiment. It features photographs of the riots colourized by Tsang as well as those of contemporary Vancouver where the riots took place. Essays by Tsang and others speak to the colonial times that preceded and followed the 1907 riots, as well as issues that Chinese, Japanese and other racialized communities in North America are facing today. White Riot poses the question: in the current ethos of anti-racism and decolonization, what does it take to reconcile our collective histories within the legacy of white supremacy?
Henry Tsang is an artist, writer and occasional curator who explores the spatial politics of history, cultural translation, community-building and food in relationship to place. His projects employ video, photography, interactive media, convivial events, and language, in particular, the west coast trade language Chinook Jargon. Presentations take the form of gallery exhibitions, pop-up street food offerings, 360 video walking tours, curated dinners, ephemeral and permanent public art. Henry is a past recipient of the VIVA Award and is Associate Dean at Emily Carr University of Art & Design.
White Riot received the 2024 City of Vancouver Book Award and the Dr. Edgar Wickberg Prize for the Best Book on Chinese Canadian History, and was a finalist for the BC and Yukon Book Prize’s Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award.
Includes essays by the Asian Canadian Labour Alliance, Paul Englesberg, Melody Ma, Angela May and Nicole Yakashiro, Jeffery R. Masuda, Aaron Franks, Audrey Kobayashi and Trevor Wideman, and Andy Yan, with a foreword by Patricia E. Roy.
