Henry Tsang is the author of White Riot: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023) and creator of 360 Riot Walk, a 360 video walking tour of the Riots. He is also an artist whose projects explore the spatial politics of history, cultural translation, community-building and food in relationship to place. These can take the form of video, photography, interactive media, convivial events, and language, especially Chinook Jargon, the North American west coast trade language. Presentations take the form of gallery exhibitions, pop-up street food offerings, 360 video walking tours, curated dinners, ephemeral and permanent public art. He is the recipient of the 2024 City of Vancouver Book Award and the Dr. Edgar Wickberg Prize for the Best Book on Chinese Canadian History. Henry is an Associate Dean at Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver.
White Riot: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver explores the conditions leading up to and the impact of a demonstration and parade in Vancouver, Canada, organized by the Asiatic Exclusion League and the ensuing mob attack on the city's Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian communities. Emblematic of a systemically racist era, White Riot reveals the social and political environment of the time, when racialized communities were targeted through legislated as well as physical acts of exclusion and violence.
Based on 360 Riot Walk, a 360-degree video walking tour by artist and author Henry Tsang, White Riot offers an intersectional approach to this pivotal moment in the history of racialized communities and a cultural and social context for understanding for the current wave of anti-Asian sentiment. It features photographs of the riots colourized by Tsang as well as those of contemporary Vancouver where the riots took place. Essays by Tsang and others speak to the colonial times that preceded and followed the 1907 riots, as well as issues that Chinese, Japanese and other racialized communities in North America are facing today. White Riot poses the question: in the current ethos of anti-racism and decolonization, what does it take to reconcile our collective histories within the legacy of white supremacy?
Henry Tsang introduces, demonstrates and facilitates a discussion based on 360 Riot Walk, a 360 video walking tour of the 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver. Trace the history and route of the mob that attacked the Chinese Canadian and Japanese Canadian communities following the demonstration and parade organized by the Asiatic Exclusion League. Participants are brought into the social and political environment of the time where racialized communities were targeted through legislated as well as physical acts of exclusion and violence.
This interactive artwork is ideally experienced on mobile devices on location in Vancouver, but can also be accessed anywhere on a browser. The soundtrack is available in 4 languages of the local residents of the period: English, Cantonese, Japanese and Punjabi, with an introduction in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim.
See Presentation and Workshop Information above. Teacher's guide available.
