Union Gallery’s latest exhibition was a journey through familial love and loss that left a lasting impact.
The recent exhibition at Union Gallery, Love ends. But what if it doesn’t? showcased the work of Caryn Wei Ya Xie, BEd ’25, and Meenakashi Ghadial, BEd ’24. Featured in the Union Gallery’s main space from March 5 to May 11, both artists gained inspiration from family photo archives, solidifying moments into objects of permanence through their paintings—highlighting themes of family, love, and loss.
The artists use oil paintings as a creative medium to capture each of the artist’s multifaceted identities—Xie’s experience as a Cantonese Chinese-Canadian and Ghadial’s identity as a queer Punjabi-Canadian.
Throughout history, immigrant communities often experience losses through the process of displacement and movement. Using these ideas, Xie and Ghadial created their paintings as physical documentation to preserve their family legacies.
The exhibition’s name comes from the final lines of Ada Limón’s poem “The Hurting Kind.” The title was chosen because it reflects a process of searching for proof and evidence for the continuation of love after death.
“Meenakshi and I play with the same ideas of continuing love and cementing legacy after loss,” Xie said in an interview with The Journal. “Not only death, but the loss of physical artifacts over processes of migration by painting these memories of our families.”
Xie said she only paints her family members through the lens of their shared history. She uses digital archives of her family’s shared memories, specifically birthdays spent in her childhood apartment, to transform the impermanence of digital documentation into something “larger than life.”
Painting her family celebrating birthdays and experiencing moments of joy and normalcy helps to combat stigmas and ideas that Asian people are reserved and inexpressive, Xie added.
As a history student, Xie combines historical themes into her art, such as Edward Said’s book, “Orientalism,” which renders the Asian body synonymous with the “Other.” She also incorporates facial recognition into her paintings to satirize the concept of Techno-Orientalism.
“Techno-Orientalism manifests as the portrayal of Asian societies as technologically advanced and futuristic, but its people as robotic and unfeeling,” Xie said in an interview with The Journal.
Xie uses her graphic design skills to incorporate bright colours into her paintings and texts to offer them a digital aesthetic, strategically integrating grays to give the paintings a blue tint as though the audience is looking at a computer screen.
“My work is flat with very little texture because I paint section by section,” Xie said, “I like how flat it is because I want the work to act as a screen and the lack of texture helps to convey this.”
Similarly, Ghadial uses old photos from her parents’ wedding albums and more recent photos depicting her relationship with her parents, grandparents, and now ex-partner to create her paintings.
Throughout her paintings, Ghadial uses a car as a nuanced symbol to explore many recurring themes in her life. The car has gone from being a place of safety, freedom, and intimacy with her ex-partner to solitude, loneliness, and tradition. Using the car, Ghadial captures life’s complexities and hypocrisies.
By transforming photographs from our increasingly digital age into permanent physical artifacts, Love ends. But what if it doesn’t? ties the past and the present together. A feat that was only achievable through this collaboration.
Tags
family, Painting, Union Gallery
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