Bau Xi gallery celebrating 50 years. Sylvia Tait (middle, second from left) and Alistair Bell outside.Handout
In 1965, Bau-Xi Huang started a small art gallery in Vancouver's South Granville neighbourhod to have a space to show his ow paintings. Fifty years later, the Chinese immigrant and his eponymous gallery are a pillar of the Canadian contemporary art scene, having given space to everyone from painter Joseph Plaskett to photographer Barbara Cole and sculptor Paul Vexler. Now run mostly by Huang's three children, Tien, Phen and Lieng, Bau-Xi Gallery is a mini-empire: The original West Coast space spawned two galleries, for art and for photography, in Toronto; in 2002, the family acquired the 20,000-square-foot Foster/White Gallery in Seattle. As he kicked off a month-long anniversary exhibition at the Toronto art gallery in early May, Tien Huang looked back on his family's half-century in art.
How did your dad come to open his own gallery?
He was 21 or 22 when he arrived from China. He took an interest in art in a very early age and was quite interested in calligraphy when he was in China and Hong Kong. When he moved to North America, he was exposed to contemporary Western art. He went to night school at the Vancouver School of Art, which is now Emily Carr University of Art and Design. His teachers told him to quit school and just continue to paint because they said – in his words – that there was nothing further that they could teach him. He was getting attention and invited to show at the Seattle Art Museum and as far east as Fredericton and all points in between.
Vancouver was a very small place. He approached the New Design Gallery, but they were representing a full roster. He was also painting very large abstract paintings, five-by-seven-feet, things like that. So, 11 years later after he got here, he started the gallery. He was working at a shingle mill – it was a common practice at the time to pay an immigrant or Asian labour half as much as domestic labour. He told his boss that he needed a leave of absence for six months to visit family. He took $600 and rented a space and fixed it up. On opening night, there was press, so his boss found out and called him up and told him his job wasn't there any more. So that was that, there was nothing to turn back to.
And in the beginning they were having new shows every two weeks?
It was a crazy amount of work. It was just my parents, my dad and my mom, Xisa. To do everything that they did at the time was phenomenal. Everything was written by hand; the address list was written by hand. They had a one-colour printer, it looks like an old printing press. The invitations were printed on that.
Do you have a first memory of the gallery? Or a first art memory?
Attending openings and cleaning wine glasses and serving trays of food. Coming into the gallery on weekends and [the painter] Jack Shadbolt, who's now passed on, would grab my hands and I'd stand on his toes and walk around the gallery. Actually, the coach house in the back of the Toronto space, [the painter] Guido Molinari laid a lot of the bricks back there. My father needed to renovate the coach house, so Guido came and laid bricks with him because I guess that's what he knew how to do before he was a painter. I wish I knew which ones, because anything touched by Guido Molinari is worth a lot of money now.
Did your parents ever talk about whether it was difficult or easy to convince Canadians that Canadian art was worth something?
I remember my parents complaining that what sold in New York for $10,000 would sell in Vancouver for $1,000. That said, I think art and this environment tends to have an elitist air in the first place, so we need to make it accessible and encourage everybody young and old, rich or poor, to just come in and look at it. Its financial value is not important. It's how it relates to who we are.
In the gallery's long history, who are the artists you were particularly excited or gratified to be associated with?
I better pick someone who's deceased so that nobody else can be jealous. Jack Shadbolt continues to be someone I'm really grateful to have worked with and known. He's a major part of our family's art collection. As for living, current artists, I'd prefer not to say.
I really love the colour and the energy of Janna Watson's paintings.
Janna makes it look so easy. All of her work is so effortless. It has this freedom and beauty and drama and composition. She's been one of our most successful young artists to date.
Joshua Jensen-Nagle's work is also wonderful, sort of nostalgic and modern at the same time.
Josh has such a way with images, his medium being photography. Whatever he might be doing, palace interiors or a ski slope or a beach in Portugal, he's able to capture a serenity and a simplicity so successfully.
When did your dad move back to China?
He still has a place in Vancouver, and so he's half and half. He's been going back to China since as far back as I can remember. More recently, 10 years ago, he was considering opening a gallery in China. But dealing with the bureaucracy behind bringing artwork into China was very frustrating. He realized that what he was really wanting to do was pursue his art, so he gave up on having a Bau-Xi Gallery in Beijing.
He's got a ceramic studio in a place where porcelain comes from, basically. He's doing totally unusual work. He's 82 years old and he's being invited to lecture at the universities there, all of which teach porcelain. He has all of these young art students wanting to work in his studio. He's having a good time.