Current Programs
January
Year to Imagine -
Persimmon Dye Workshop
School Outreach Workshop
This year’s LunarFest School Outreach Program is a dye workshop using persimmon dye all the way from Taiwan. Dubbed the Town of Persimmons, Xinpu Township in Hsinchu County grows an abundance of persimmons. One day, the grannies at the persimmon processing factories realize their handprints, sticky with persimmon juice, leave beautiful stains on the walls. And so the idea of using persimmons as dye to make art was born!
Coastal Lunar Lanterns -
Lost In Nature
The Lantern City
The Coastal Lunar Lanterns is where The Lantern City began. Facing the ocean and presenting artworks by Indigenous artists from Canada and from Taiwan, these lanterns are a physical and visual bridging of cultures. As these Indigenous artists share with us stories from their tribes and ancestors, we are reminded that we live on their unceded and traditional lands. Through their art, we see the faces of their loved ones intertwined with the warm embrace of nature. Whose face will you see?
Our Wonderland -
We Are Family
The Lantern City
Vancouver is a beautifully diverse city filled with many stories to tell. The artworks on display in the We Are Family location of The Lantern City are informed by the artists’ childhoods and coloured with their cultures. These lanterns remind us to hold onto our curiosity like Alice, and wander into our wonderlands to learn about each other, together. Where will the rabbits lead you?
Forever Young - The Cycle
The Lantern City
Granville Island is a place where the arts community thrives. The Forever Young lanterns capture the youthful energy and endless potential of the inner child in all of us that we must never lose. This year, the lantern artworks are lit up with the bright colours of family legacies and knowledge that we pass on with care and pride to the next generation. What will you gift for tomorrow?
Legend of the Trees
Pancouver Cover Story
Some things are quite predictable about Lunar New Year. In non-pandemic years, there will always be lion dances on West Pender Street. Moreover, someone in the English-language media will invariably interview a person of Asian ancestry about the animal for which the New Year is named. And politicians of all stripes will issue Lunar New Year greetings to their constituents of Asian origin.
Medical Melodies
Pancouver Cover Story
At the recent LunarFest Vancouver concert at the Orpheum, audience members might not have noticed Tom Su. He was one of many elegantly dressed members of the Harmonia String Ensemble, playing their hearts out for conductor Nicholas Urquhart. Su is an accomplished and versatile violinist who immigrated from Taiwan 20 years ago.
February
Aysanabee
Pancouver Cover Story
Nowadays, life is very good for Oji-Cree recording artist Aysanabee. With tour stops at the Fox Cabaret in Vancouver on February 15 and in Toronto on March 2, he’s playing Canada’s two largest English-speaking cities. On March 11, he’ll be among the performers when CBC broadcasts the Juno Awards. In addition, Aysanabee is up for contemporary Indigenous Artist or Group of the Year for his album Watin, which is named after his grandfather.
March
Black and Rural
Pancouver Cover Story
“I am one of those voices,” Jones replies by phone from a Vancouver coffee shop. The storyteller, singer, and actor lives on a mountainside on the west side of Kootenay Lake. After growing up in Vancouver, she migrated to this mostly white region nearly a decade ago, living for a while in Kaslo. “Kaslo was too much of a booming metropolis,” Jones quips. “It has 800 people. So, I actually moved. I live north of the town.”
Busting Stereotypes
Pancouver Cover Story
There’s a memorable scene early in Riceboy Sleeps, by Vancouver director and screenwriter Anthony Shim (심명보). A blue-collar factory worker slaps the ass of a Korean single mother, So-Young, played by Choi Seung-yoon (최승윤). So-Young immediately confronts the much larger man. “If you touch me again, I will kill you,” she boldly declares. He responds by telling her to take it easy, but So-Young won’t be brushed off.
April
Sakura Day
Pancouver Cover Story
Sometimes, a simple idea can grow into a magnificent success. Vancouver resident Linda Poole was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti with her husband, then a Canadian ambassador, when she learned about Sakura festivals in Japan. She heard about them from the couple’s friend, Hisanobu Hasama, who was then Japan’s ambassador to Haiti.
Diasporic Art
Pancouver Cover Story
Vancouver lens-based artist Khim Hipol says that he creates art to advance education. He has a straightforward motivation. Hipol worries that too many children of Filipino immigrants don’t understand the national symbols of the Philippines or the country’s history of resistance.
May
Amanda Sum
Pancouver Cover Story
Many composers, ranging from John Lennon to Justin Bieber, have written songs about apologizing. But no one has done it quite like Vancouver singer-songwriter Amanda Sum. “Sorry”, from her debut New Age Attitudes album, opens with a simple folk-y chord structure on guitar. This offers plenty of room for Sum’s evocative lyrics, which deliver a walloping rebuttal to systemic discrimination and age-old racial tropes. And it’s done from an intensely personal perspective.
September
Hope Talk
2023 Vancouver TAIWANfest
When the Dutch East India Company (VOC) left Taiwan in 1662, 38 years of Dutch Colonization forever changed the island and its people. Four hundred years later, Taiwanese people still have mixed emotions when it comes to the identity of Taiwan. Yes, the Dutch are long gone, but where are the Taiwanese going?
October
Jade Music Fest
2023 Jade Music Fest
Jade Music Festival is a global music industry conference being held in the beautiful city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. JMF’s inaugural year (2022) goal is to present a majority of Chinese language artists from Canada, in the hopes of giving the Chinese language speaking Canadians the representation and equal opportunities in the Canadian and international music industry they very much deserve.
January
© 2023 The Society of We Are Canadians Too
The Society of We Are Canadians Too is grateful to be held on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam Indian Band), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish Nation), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation). We acknowledge our privilege to be gathered here, and commit to work with and be respectful to the Indigenous peoples of this land while we engage in meaningful conversations of culture and reconciliation.
