On a recent trip to the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, Toronto curator Yantong Li observed something unexpected on the horizon. He could no longer see snow and ice on the peak of Cangshan Mountain west of Dali City. The Dali-born Li is curator of Dwelling Under Distant Suns, an upcoming Art Museum at the University of Toronto exhibition at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (7 Hart House Circle).
“An unstable climate has made the mountainous environment precarious, with native vegetation in gradual decline and water cycles becoming unpredictable,” Li says in recent Art Museum news release. “This sight was a direct visualization of climate-induced catastrophe—sensed only in longue durée—and I wanted to locate methodologies to represent these disparate sites across time and space.”
Dwelling Under Distant Suns addresses the struggle to bring visibility to the environmentally unpredictable landscape. A master of visual studies (curatorial) candidate at the University of Toronto, Li “works at the intersection of postcolonial ecocriticism, geopolitics, regional folklores and decolonization”, according to his biography.
“I included film-based works in this exhibition because representations of catastrophe across digital media have wreaked havoc on our attention span, rendering viewers as passive voyeurs,” Li stated. “All the film works in the exhibition require lengthy sit-ins, denying immediate consumption but also extending an invitation to viewers to engage in a dialogue, with the only prerequisite being the willingness to sit with it.”
Dwelling restages cyanide poisoning
One of those films, Alvin Luong’s Cyanide Debt, is newly commissioned. According to the news release, it “restages and reimagines a mass cyanide poisoning in Bangkok”. Luong relied on cassava—Thailand’s main agricultural export—to create a weak solution of cyanide.
The exhibition also includes Solveig Qu Suess’s filmed meditation on the effects of hydroelectric power generation on the Mekong River. Another work by Kent Chan, Future Tropics, creates a “fictional scenario of a future global tropic that blurs geographies, histories, and cultures”.
“What is at stake when the media venerates the spectacular, whilst disaster and violence become postponed?” the Art Museum asks on its website. “The artists in the exhibition invite alternative strategies of apprehension that make the image-world of cataclysm more immediate and present.”
Li has ethnic Bai lineage. There are more than two million Bai people, who comprise one of 56 officially recognized ethnic groups in China. Most live in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Hunan provinces.
The Art Museum at the University of Toronto will present Dwelling Under Distant Suns from September 4 to December 20. For more information, visit the website. Learn more about diverse communities from the Toronto Spark website. Follow the Toronto Spark on X @TOSparkOfficial and Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
