Richmond BC, Canada #richmondartgallerybc
This public art project is featured in tandem with Restless by Nature: Mary Sui Yee Wong, 1990s to the Present, a major survey exhibition presented at Richmond Art Gallery from April 12 to June 8, 2025.
Mary Sui Yee Wong’s TREASURE (1999) was originally a public art commission that was part of Québec’s Art and Architecture Integration Policy. The public artwork currently sits in the foyer of a hospital in Montréal’s Chinatown. The hospital serves many Chinese seniors who are ambulatory or have limited mobility, seldom venturing outside or beyond the grounds. With the installation, Wong decided to bring the atmosphere of a natural setting into the sterile interior space, for patients to enjoy. It consists of a four-panel mural depicting the sky, bracketing a landscape drawing, while the Chinese character 宝 (meaning “treasure”) rendered in glass sits in a shallow basin of water below.
TREASURE II (2025) is a new iteration of the original work, featuring two photographs of a vivid blue sky with billowing clouds, which frame a black-and-white detail from the classical Chinese landscape painting Buddhist Temples amid Autumn Mountains by an unidentified artist (circa fourteenth and fifteenth century). In this version, Wong has inserted into the painting the Chinese character 宝 so that it floats above a misty, mountainous backdrop. TREASURE II seeks to honour two important pillars of Chinese culture: the paintings of times past and the precious elders of the present day. As the popular saying goes, 家有一老如有一宝. This translates as “Having an elder in the family is like having a treasure.”
Given the significant Chinese diaspora community in Richmond, Lansdowne Station is an especially fitting location. The work invites viewers of all backgrounds to ponder the relationship between history and contemporaneity, culture and nature, past and present, young and old.
Presented by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art Gallery in partnership with Capture.
