Chinatown Reimagined: Exhibition Walk-through

The Chinatown Reimaged pop up exhibition welcomes community members and residents outside of Chinatown to learn how the Chinese Exclusion Act impacted, and continues to impact, Montreal's Chinatown. Curator and artist Lan Yee provided a walkthrough of the exhibition along with the co-founder of the Jia foundation, Jessica Chen.

The exhibition, hosted by the Jia Foundation, is a part of the three-day long Chinatown Reimagined forum. It includes online panels and in-person events geared at engaging the Montreal community with Chinatown and strengthening community within this neighbourhood. The multi-room exhibit includes works of both artists and scholarly researchers.

The Chinatown Reimagined forum intends to allow Montrealers to learn and reflect on how colonial policies affected Chinese immigrants and the development of their communities. 

This exhibit also looked at the future for this neighbourhood.

The exhibit includes City Player, a virtual reality version of Chinatown that allows participants to explore the preservation and development options for Chinatown. Viewers are able to walk through virtual Chinatown, demolish buildings, develop new buildings, specify the mix of commercial and residential buildings, and much more. Viewers can then take photos and specify what they want or don't want. 

City Player was developed by the Next Generation Citizen's Institute at Concordia University. Chistopher Gibbs, the senior advisor of the Institute told Local 514 that this data would be kept private and not used for input on the development of Chinatown. He added that as this is a pilot project. Future versions of City Player might be used to provide input to developers on Chinatown and other neighbourhoods.