LAIWAN

LAIWAN is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in apartheid Rhodesia. She has been investigating colonialism, with aim toward a decoloniality, since the late 1980s. She also has been exploring embodiment since 2000, through performativity, audio, music, improvisation, and varieties of media, along with bodily and emotional ways of knowing, so as to unravel and engage presence. Talonbooks published TENDER: selected poems by Laiwan in Spring 2020. 

Recent public commissions have also enabled her to focus on issues of urban development, touching on poetic and philosophic themes related to current questions of environment and the built cityscape of Vancouver. Based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, she founded the OR Gallery in 1983 in Vancouver and teaches in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College, USA.