In 2006, the McMaster Museum of Art received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts – Media Arts Commissioning Program for Landscapes, a new work by Richard Fung, which will be shown for the first time this Thursday, November 20, at the launch of his exhibition at McMaster.

Fung, who has an award-winning video-based and critical cultural practice of over 25 years, has created three video projections, seamlessly morphing recent footage from contemporary Ontario terrains of Hamilton, Warkworth and Scarborough, with 19th century engravings and paintings by J.M.W. Turner. The resulting projections are what Professor Monika Kin Gagnon describes as “enchanted, though fraught scenes of development, bringing forth, new cognitive-political spaces and dramatically expanded senses of entangled histories.”

“Being of Chinese heritage in the Caribbean and now in Canada I am sensitive to issues of location. Spatial politics are at the spine of my work,” says Fung on his inspiration for the exhibit. “In Landscapes, I use visual puns in the hope of 'making strange' the landscapes that we take for granted, pointing to the histories of their transformation.”

Fung will present an Artist's Talk on Thursday, November 20 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. in TSH-203 as part of the School of the Arts Visiting Artist Program.

The Public Reception for his exhibition at the Museum is also on Thursday, November 20 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Fung's tapes, which include My Mother's Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000) and Uncomfortable (2005), have been widely screened and collected internationally and have been broadcast in Canada and the United States. His essays have been published in many journals and anthologies, and he is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics , recently updated and translated into French. Fung is a past Rockefeller Fellow at New York University and has received the Bell Canada Award for Video as well as the Toronto Arts Award for Media Art. He is associate professor of integrated media at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

An exhibition catalogue with an essay by Monika Kin Gagnon, writer, critic and associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, will be available.