Hours
Sunday | 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM |
Monday | 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM |
Tuesday | 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM |
Wednesday | 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM |
Thursday | 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM |
Friday | 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM |
Saturday | 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM |
Closed on statutory holidays.
Birds and Rocks in Cloud City presents a lively natural world integrating the two cultures dear to the Chinese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist Jiangang Su. Enchanted by BC’s natural environment, Su skillfully situates birds native to Canada in the poetic settings typical to traditional Chinese ink and brush paintings. Equally meticulously depicted are the amorphous and porous Taihu (Lake Tai) rocks that are native to Su’s home region Suzhou, which have been appreciated by Chinese literati throughout the millennia.
A magnolia warbler shares a flowering pear tree with buzzing bees, a dark-eyed junco rests on a sycamore maple branch whose leaves have just started to wilt. Although these scenes are partly constructed through Su’s imagination, they are also the results of hundreds of sketches made by the artist while bird watching in the Greater Vancouver area. Embellishing these scenes with inscriptions of passages of ancient literature or lines of poetry, and impressions of leisure seals engraved with brief mottos, Su combines three of his most practiced disciplines—calligraphy, painting, and Chinese seal carving—on one pictorial plane.
Within Chinese philosophical and spiritual traditions of stone appreciation, rocks are often associated with clouds. Certain scholars’ rocks or false mountain rocketries are referred to as the roots of clouds. When Su first arrived in Vancouver, he was immediately drawn to the term “cloud city”—the nickname given to the city by early Cantonese immigrants. During his residency at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in 2022, he created a series of paintings depicting different forms of Taihu rocks, inspired by the miniature mountains constructed by artisans from Suzhou in the garden. The ever morphing rocks in misty landscapes, in tandem with the harmonious relationship between the local birds and their settings have become Su’s visual language for evoking his immigrant story and personal philosophy.
Biography
Born in 1974 in Suzhou, China, Jiangang Su is a calligrapher, painter, seal carver, Kintsugi artist, and educator. He studied under the renowned calligrapher and seal carver Gongda Yan in the 1980s, and graduated from the Changshu Institute of Technology. After immigrating to Canada in 2016 and setting up his studio in Richmond, Su has had exhibitions at Lipont Gallery, Sunzen Gallery, and Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, and co-organized the Vancouver International Chinese Calligraphy Contest in 2022. Su’s work is held in the collections of multiple institutions in both China and Canada.
City Hall Galleria is located on the ground floor of Richmond City Hall, 6911, No.3 Road, Richmond, V6Y 2C1
Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:15 am to 5 pm, except on public holidays