With the coming of Emancipation in 1834 to the island of Jamaica, the formerly enslaved sought to leave the site of the plantation in droves. Faced with a shortage of labor on the plantations, the white elite of the island and the imperial powers of Britain turned to countries such as China to fill these labor shortages in an indentureship scheme that would see mainly Hakka Chinese immigrants arriving in Jamaica starting in 1840, though there is evidence of a Chinese presence on the island from as far back as the 1700s. Many of these new Chinese arrivals would remain on the island, sporadically going back to China to visit relatives, while more often than not encouraging relatives to relocate to the island. This growing community would see Chinese cemeteries being built on the island, Buddhists temples, and today an area of downtown Kingston has been recognized as the first China Town on the island. Chinese festivals would slowly be incorporated into local festival traditions and sadly there would be two violent riots targeting the growing and thriving Chinese community and businesses on the island. Jamaicans of Chinese descent have also represented the island in the Miss Jamaica and Miss World Competitions. These early Chinese immigrants then would go on to constitute an integral and significant component of contemporary Jamaican identity.

“Show Me a Mountain” hopes to shed a spotlight on this dynamic community by having two panel discussions with writers and visual artists who are Chinese of Jamaican descent:

Session 2: Visual artists

Thursday, April 22nd — 7AM Jamaica/US/ Noon UK/ 7PM Shanghai

Featured visual artists: Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow and Albert Chong. Session will be moderated by Jacqueline Bishop.

The program will be one hour long. Jacqueline Bishop will start off with a general welcome to the program and the artists. Then Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow and Albert Chong will do a 10 minute power point presentation of their work. This presentation will be followed up with a discussion by Jacqueline Bishop with the two artists before the discussion is opened up to the audience for the last 15 minutes of the program.

Albert Chong — Chong was born in Jamaica where his parents ran a grocery store and his father was a well-respected justice of the peace. His multicultural heritage is described in an L.A. times article: “Half-Chinese, half-Jamaican Chong was raised Catholic but has followed Rastafarianism, the Ethiopian-inspired political/religious movement, and Santeria, the syncretic religion forged by African slaves living under Christian domination in the Caribbean.”

Chong immigrated permanently to the United States in 1977, settling first with his sisters in Brooklyn. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1978 to 1981, and in 1981, Chong started his exhibiting career. In 1988, his family moved to San Diego, and Chong attended the University of California, San Diego. In 1991, Chong received his Master of Fine Arts degree from that university.

Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow was born in Manchester, Jamaica to a Chinese-Jamaican father and an Afro-Jamaican mother. Says Lyn-Kee-Chow, “The African diaspora, European colonialism and Chinese migration make-up significant parts of my origin story. The ancestral convergence in Jamaica (slave owners, slaves and migrant workers) followed by my family’s immigration to the United States, informs my artistic practice.” She is best known for her work in performance art. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and is a mentor in the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program.

Jacqueline Bishop is an award-winning photographer, painter and writer born and raised in Jamaica, who now lives and works in New York City

Jacqueline Bishop is the author of a novel, The River’s Song, two collections of poems, Fauna, and Snapshots from Istanbul, an art book, Writers Who Paint… Three Jamaican Artists, and most recently, The Gymnast and other Positions, a collection of short stories, essays and interviews, which won the non-fiction award in  2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.