Vancouver Art Gallery

Offsite: Lani Maestro by Makiko Hara

Photos: Lani Maestro, No Pain Like This Body, 2022, site specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, Photo: Kyla Bailey

[Image Description: This work is a red neon sign diptych installed at the outdoor Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite at 1100 west Georgia Street. The exterior wall has a surface grid of large grey tiles. Each of the two neon statements fills three vertical tiles, installed two columns apart. The words are stacked vertically, one below the other. On the left, text reads: “No Pain Like This Body.” On the right, text reads: “No Body Like This Pain.”]

Passing by the luxurious Shangri-La building on Georgia Street, surrounded by high-rise buildings in the centre of Vancouver’s financial district, one encounters two bright ruby-red neon signs: “No Pain Like This Body” and “No Body Like This Pain.” On dark and rainy winter evenings, the text reflects in the pool of water that extends from the anonymous grey wall from which the signs hang. This is the Offsite installation No Pain Like This Body (2010/2022) by Lani Maestro.

At first glance, the neon-light installation is minimal; the echoing texts are poetic and intuitive. If one tries to make sense of them as a straightforward message or statement, they will appear lyrical and somewhat paradoxical.

What does “No Pain Like This Body” mean? What does “Pain” itself mean? Whose pain? Is it the artist’s pain? Or is it my pain? Is it trying to speak to something larger—a philosophical notion of human nature? And what about the text next to it, “No Body Like This Pain”? Are they connective or opposed to each other?In her art making, Maestro often uses text as a focal point and carefully composes language in response to specific architectural spaces. The text always defies a conventional interpretation, and rather poses a question. She invites the viewer to become part of the work, prompting each person to create a reciprocal relationship. Paradoxical questions and physical, embodied experiences are important features of Maestro’s work, and they are particularly key to the installation at Offsite.

In a 2005 interview, Maestro stated:

We have a fear of not knowing, of things that we do not easily identify, and we are always looking for a frame to refer it to. I think my work resists any kind of representation in that it is difficult to speak of the complexities of the world as event.¹

No Pain Like This Body was originally produced for the solo exhibition her rain, which I curated at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in 2010. Here, at Offsite, it has been refabricated at a significantly larger scale and placed in a new public art context in an outdoor location, creating space for new encounters with passers-by. The work’s two phrases emerged from Maestro’s absorbed experience of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood during a site visit in 2008, and they take inspiration from the novel No Pain Like This Body by Harold Sonny Ladoo. At Offsite, the work takes on additional and different meanings, even for those who saw the original installation.

Trinidadian Canadian author Harold Sonny Ladoo’s novel, written in the 1970s, takes its own title from the Dhammapada, an ancient Indian Buddhist text. The novel depicts poverty, violence and Indian peasant families who were sent to the Caribbean as indentured workers in the early nineteenth century. The threats of nature are depicted in rhythmic Indo-Caribbean English, deploying words that speak to the truth of human life in the midst of suffering. Ladoo’s language is raw and full of energy, and his prose lays bare the absurd reality deeply rooted in the power structures of colonialism. The rawness of the novel No Pain Like This Body embodies the very human spirit and energy that continues against such a reality. I believe it is this same energy that Maestro absorbed in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, rooted in her own lived experience and born of her practice of questioning herself and her place in this present reality. Her artwork does not offer the standard “benevolent view” of socially vulnerable people, tragedy and trauma that we often project onto that particular neighbourhood. Rather, Maestro’s installation accesses raw human energy and a reciprocal interrelationship with the artist’s personal lived experience.

The neon texts of No Pain Like This Body, now relocated from the Downtown Eastside to the city centre, come to pose a more universal question. This question revolves around finding one’s place in the society in which we live—filled as it is with violence, suffering and various other challenges for which there are no solutions—and embracing its contradictions.

Maestro describes her artworks as an “architecture of the body.” The space she creates leads us to a sense of the undetermined and urges us feel the present moment through our senses. It induces an awareness of our own state of mind through a dialogue with our inner self—much like a Zen koan.² Maestro asks: “How do we occupy space and how does space occupy us?” This question has no concrete answer. But it does suggest the inevitability of exploring the interplay and complex nature of thoughts of one’s self and of the other.

While a person might see this work from their car on the way to work, or while walking down the sidewalk, not everyone will stop to face it. Exchanges between people and artworks placed in the public sphere are unpredictable. However, when one does stop in this space and confronts these two neon texts—guided by curiosity, empathy, repulsion or another feeling—it can elicit an experience beyond the relationship of seeing and appreciating a work of art; an experience that involves all the senses, including physical awareness, a bodily response to the artwork and the environment.

Footnotes:

Lani Maestro, quoted in “The Art of Letting Go,” Concordian, October 26, 2005, https://theconcordian.com/2005/10/the-art-of-letting-go/.
A koan is “a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment.” Merriam Websters Dictionary, s.v. “koan.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Lani Maestro was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1957. Her minimalist artworks, characterized by their restrained aesthetic, often respond to specific architectural environments and use various media, including sound, neon, video, light, writing and bookworks. Maestro earned her BFA from the University of the Philippines, Manila, and her MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax. She is the recipient of NSCAD University’s Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts (2018) and the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for outstanding contribution to the arts by a Canadian artist (2012). Maestro’s work has been shown extensively both in Canada and internationally, including the Art Gallery of Ontario; National Gallery of Canada; Wharf, Centre d’art contemporain de Basse-Normandie, France; Art in General, New York; Singapore Art Museum; and Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila. Maestro was a Philippines representative at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. She has taught graduate seminars at Concordia University, Montréal, and studio art at NSCAD University, Halifax, and the University of Lethbridge, Alberta.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Makiko Hara is an award-winning independent curator, lecturer, writer and art and cultural consultant based in Vancouver. From 2007 to 2013, she was Chief Curator/Deputy Director of Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. In addition, she has worked with many visual artists on a variety of projects as an independent curator, including Fictive Communities Asia – Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama, Japan, 2014; and Rock Paper Scissors: Cindy Mochizuki, Yonago City Museum of Art, Tottori, Japan, 2018. Hara was appointed Guest Curator of the 2014 Koganecho Bazaar, and in 2017, she was invited to join the advisory team at the International Exchange Center, Akita University of Art, Japan. Hara co-founded Pacific Crossings, a British Columbia–based curatorial platform, in 2018. In response to the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, Hara founded My Kitchen Anthropology Museum, where she organized solo exhibitions by Hank Bull and Marcia Crosby. Hara received the Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize in 2020.

Offsite: Lani Maestro was organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery on behalf of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program and guest curated by Makiko Hara. This exhibition is an initiative of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Institute of Asian Art. It is being presented from November 18, 2022 to April 9, 2023.

Offsite is the Vancouver Art Gallery’s outdoor public art space in the heart of the city. Presenting an innovative program of temporary projects, it is a site for local and international contemporary artists to exhibit works related to the surrounding urban context. Featured artists consider the site-specific potential of art within the public realm and respond to the changing social and cultural conditions of our contemporary world.

Since the launch of Offsite in 2009, the Vancouver Art Gallery has presented twenty-three public artworks in the forms of sculpture, multimedia, film, ceramic and photo-based installations.

CURATOR: Makiko Hara
PROJECT MANAGER: Julie Martin, Curatorial Assistant, Vancouver Art Gallery

ARTWORK: Lani Maestro, No Pain Like This Body, 2022, installation, Courtesy of the Artist
PHOTOGRAPHY: Kyla Bailey, Vancouver Art Gallery

Offsite is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery on behalf of the City of Vancouver Public Art Program. The Gallery recognizes Ian Gillespie, President, Westbank; Ben Yeung, President, Peterson Investment Group; and the residents of the Shangri-La for their support of this space.

The Vancouver Art Gallery is a not-for-profit organization supported by its members, individual donors, corporate funders, foundations, the City of Vancouver, the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts.