An exterior image from “The Young Comrade” at The New Gallery. This public-facing curtain depicts a propaganda display that I saw at the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution in Beijing. The propaganda display originally depicted public celebration after the Chinese revolution of 1949 in the formally-colonized coastal city of Tianjin. The 1949 revolution is a historical moment that The Young Comrade combines with a magic realist play by Bertolt Brecht.
The architecture in this display must have been dated to the early 1900s when Western-style architecture was either built by force within colonized Chinese territory by Western nations. I choose to display this curtain to the public in Calgary because it looks similar to the building that The New Gallery is a tenant of in the Chinatown neighbourhood of Calgary.
I was thinking about how this style of architecture could be found in the costal cities of China and also in Mohkinstsis, also known as Calgary. Both had forceful contacts with the West all the while Chinese coolies worked and died in both the trading ports in the colonized cities and also across Canada while building the Canada Pacific Railway. In Cantonese, letting the young men in a family go work as coolies for Westerners was euphemistically termed, 賣豬仔, or “to sell the piglets”.
