VANCOUVER — On a Friday night in early May a private party is being held beside a rooftop sculpture garden in the Wing Sang building, the oldest in Chinatown, and now the home of condo marketing wizard Bob Rennie’s new contemporary art gallery and his business operations.
To the 1889 building on Pender Street where Chinese immigrant businessman Yip Sang once lived with his four wives and 23 children, Rennie has invited close friends, art collectors, curators and a few media types, in honour of Richard Jackson, the Los Angeles artist whose conceptual work he has purchased extensively and is now exhibiting.
After the party has wound down, Rennie Collection director Wendy Chang gives a mini-tour of the new exhibit. A wander through the gallery leaves the mind boggling at what Yip Sang, who made his fortune as a labour contractor for the CPR, would have made of some of the art now in his former home. There are bears with urinal heads and urinals with bear heads, for example; products of an imagination so wonderfully twisted, it’s as if the visiting neo-Dadaist Jackson absorbed some lingering fumes from the opium produced out back in Market Alley in the late 1800s…
Posted by: Doug Ward, Vancouver Sun
Date: May 19, 2010