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Inscapes: Our Landscape Within

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January - April 2023
Italian Cultural Centre

Summary

Inscapes: Our Landscape Within explores the vulnerable landscapes and stories that contribute to the diasporic language of identity. Through invisible and visible traditions, ten artists have reclaimed history and demonstrated the shifts in today’s cultural and material history. Its social construct has guided the interrelationships between memory, healing, and trauma. These stories echo the voices of communities as they become sentinels of social change and create spaces of conversation around equity, inclusiveness, and greater diversity.

In celebration of our stories, Inscapes: Our Landscape Within has interwoven our voices and experiences of a generation.

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Featuring ten emerging, BIPOC artists: Adeline Poufong, Alayna Yan, Crystal Noir, David Aquino, Frankie McDonald, Jermaine Oxley, Jun Luo, Karl Hipol, Katrina Abad and Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa.

Curator, Shanna Cheng

Curatorial Statement

Inscapes: Our Landscape Within focuses on ten emerging artists who challenge the diasporic shifts in their positionalities in their everchanging and growing complexities of our cultural landscape. Through displacement and reach for belonging, this exhibition seeks to disrupt the misconceptions of identity and its exploration of the self. This exploration has redefined our historic culture and value systems which construct the world.

​Inscapes: Our Landscape Within captures the journey of trauma, reflection, and healing through the exchange of ideas and stories during the formative three-year period of the pandemic. Ten emerging voices tackle the transition of invisible and visible traditions of heritage and history. By echoing the same definitive work of radical actions during a prominent time of social unrest, their stories weave together the journey of connection; of internalized and inherited narratives of intersectional experiences of discrimination, injustice, and violence. The works delve deep into the regeneration of community, bringing newer values, and greater intimacy. This realm of liberation has challenged reclamations of our heritage and our stories, witnessing the process and transition into a new shape in diversity and representation of what characterizes our cultural meaning within narrative art.

In representing the tensions of relationships between all things, the artists weave together their aesthetics, stories, and oral histories, leading the way for a more equitable future. Through film animation, illustration, literary works, mixed media, painting, photography, printing, sculpture, textiles, and more, Inscapes: Our Landscape Within celebrates cultural freedom and altered modes of expression with our ten artists at the forefront of social change.

Read my Catalogue HERE.

Photograph Credit: Shanna Cheng

Photograph Edits Credit: Michelle Ha

Left to Right: Jermaine Oxley Royal, 2021 Jun Luo Mooneater, 2021 Lost in Paradise, 2021 Adeline Poufong Aunty Grace's Kitchen, 2021 Do Not Approach, 2022 Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa Untitled Weaving Composition 2, 2022 Katrina Abad No One's Gonna Love You More Than I Do, 2021

Left to Right: Karl Hipol Weaving Offcuts, 2021 Inabnutan 02, 2022 Sawali: Blueprint of Reclamation, 2022 Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa Study in Sarape, 2021

Left to Right: Katrina Abad No One's Gonna Love You More Than I Do, 2021 Crystal Noir Do Not Approach, 2022 Alayna Yan Macaroni Soup (通心粉湯) , 2021

Left to Right: Crystal Noir PEACE, 2022 Karl Hipol Inabnutan 02, 2022 Sawali: Blueprint of Reclamation, 2022 Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa Study in Sarape, 2021 Frankie McDonald Nahani, 2022 David Aquino Persona #1, 2, 3, 2022 Adeline Poufong Self Portrait, 2020

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Left to Right: Keimi Nakashima Ochoa Knot, 2020 Crystal Noir Keep Your Distance, 2022 Jermaine Oxley Royal, 2021 Jun Luo Hellocentricity, 2021 Aperture, 2021 Mooneater, 2021

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Shanna acknowledges that the work she does is on the traditional, ancestral and unceded land of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl ̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. 

© 2026 Shanna Cheng

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