Portrait of Linda Tzang , 2019
Photograph

Linda Tzang is a curator and historian at Vancouver’s Chinatown Storytelling Centre. Her family immigrated to Canada in the mid-1970s from Taiwan, when she was around five years old. As a teenager in the 1980s, Linda fell in love with the New Romantic Style. Her favourite items were bright neon socks and fluevog shoes that were symbolic of the mid-1980s. Linda thinks being an adolescent in the 1980s was somehow more freeing than being a teenager in the age of social media because people had more choices to make a personal statement through fashion. Linda was also into dramatic, performative makeup. Her eyeliner is straight, broad, and expressive, which she continues to wear to this day. Linda does not wear ethnic clothing to draw attention to her cultural heritage. Her bold fashion choices are based on aesthetic rather than cultural reasons, allowing her to form an untraditional and non-conformist style of self-fashioning.

Exhibited by:

Violet Wolfe

Other works by Unknown

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Wedding Portrait of Rose Lee , 1950s
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BC Lion’s Newsletter , 1978
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Linda at a Fashion Show , 2008
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Chinatown’s Girls Drill Team , 1960
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