Underwater Chinatown
Underwater Chinatown is an interactive website, created with Deanne Achong, that looks at the heyday of Cantonese Opera and Opera Houses in Vancouver from the 1890s to the 1920s. The piece uses archival newspapers, directories, documents, photographs, films and audio to create a visceral sense of the time and place of these theatres and the people who either presented or watched the operas. While heavily based in research, there is much in this work that is intended as imagined or hinted at. The piece was commissioned by Cinevolution Media Arts Society and was recently included in the Italian Cultural Museum’s exhibition Common Voices: The Cultural Legacy of Cantonese and Italian Opera.
The website can be found at underwaterchinatown.com