Portrait of Tiffany Le , 2010s
Photograph

This photograph shows Tiffany Le, a Montreal-based artist and first-generation Chinese Canadian who immigrated to Canada at five. The shirt with the dragon motif that Tiffany wears is a vintage piece from the early 2000s. It combines the form of a Western Hawaiian shirt from the movie Remeo and Juliet (1996) and the motif of a Chinese dragon and tiger. Tiffany learned from her mother that in imperial China, only emperors wore dragons. She thinks this piece demonstrates Western fashion appropriating Chinese fashion but repurposed it into popular culture to be mass-produced. Like Tiffany, the millennial generation of Chinese Canadian women often expresses a playful and critical attitude toward Chinese clothing. They are aware of the Western appropriation of Chinese fashion; however, they use counter-strategies by repurposing these pieces to form their own style. On a broader level, these self-fashioning practices play with culture, history, and power to continuously re-position Chinese Canadian women within the power dynamics between the West and China.

Exhibited by:

Violet Wolfe

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