The Chinese community in Antwerp is one of the oldest and largest in Belgium. It plays an important role in the city's local business and cultural life. Not far from Central Station, on Van Wesenbekestraat, you will find Chinatown with numerous Chinese restaurants, supermarkets and cultural centres.
In our temporary exhibition Happy Family, we highlight this community and, in particular, the Chinese entrepreneurs in Antwerp's hospitality industry. For this, we are collaborating with guest curator Ching Lin Pang (anthropologist, UAntwerp, KU Leuven).
The exhibition tells the story of three Chinese pioneer families and their restaurants, including the family of guest curator Ching Lin Pang herself. These families introduced Belgium to non-Western cuisine at the start of the 1950s and played a crucial role in the local hospitality industry. Visitors will learn about the families through their personal archives, their testimonies and through new work by photographer Vincen Beeckman.
Happy Family, a title with multiple layers
The title of the exhibition has multiple layers of meaning. It refers to:
- The importance of socio-economic relationships among members of a Chinese family across generations.
- The social role the Chinese restaurant has come to play in Antwerp as a 'family restaurant' for Flemish customers, also across generations.
- A specific dish from the South-Chinese cuisine with this name. It is a stir-fry dish with many ingredients such as meat, fish, tofu, and various vegetables. Due to the wealth of ingredients, every family member finds something to their liking. So, it brings happiness for every member of the family.
Expo
We tell the story of three Chinese restaurant families through interviews and documents from their family archives. Photographer Vincen Beeckman captures images of the families and their restaurants.
However, the close connection between Chinese entrepreneurs and the hospitality industry is obviously not limited to Antwerp. The exhibition also features work by Chinese-Belgian artists Sarah Yu Zeebroek, Atang and Yingda Dong. New York-based visual artist Von Hyin Kolk explores the tensions and peculiarities of her multicultural existence in her work, drawing from her experiences as the daughter of Chinese-American immigrants.