The Integrity of a Story by Jenie Gao

Alberta Printmakers is pleased to present The Integrity of a Story by Jenie Gao.

Exhibition Dates: September 26 - November 14, 2025

Opening and artist talk reception (artist in attendance): Friday, September 26 from 7pm - 9pm

Location: A/P Main Gallery | 460 42 Avenue SE, Calgary AB T2G 1Y5

About the Artist:

Jenie Gao (they/she) has run an anti-gentrification arts business since 2014, specializing in printmaking, public art, social practice, and community storytelling. They consult for cultural organizations and the public sector on equity and ethics.

Jenie pulls from experiences as a second generation Taiwanese-Chinese American and a descendant of working class immigrants. Prior to founding their business, Jenie worked in the museum industry, public education, and lean manufacturing. Through their cross section of experiences, Jenie has become attuned to issues of artists’ labour, cultural power, and institutional accountability. They run a paid apprenticeship program and have thus far mentored 25 emerging artists.

Jenie has a BFA in Printmaking/Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Their work is in 40 institutional collections including Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Cornell University, Stanford University, and the Library of Congress. Their recent exhibits include Museum of Wisconsin Art, Trout Museum of Art, Burnaby Village Museum, Cedarburg Museum, and South Bend Museum of Art. Their work has been included in publications such as PBS, Shoutout LA, and Fête Chinoise. Their art residencies include Women’s Studio Workshop in Kingston, New York; Art in the Park with Vancouver Board of Parks & Recreation: Decolonization, Art, & Culture; Ma’s House in the Shinnecock Reservation in Southampton, New York; Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in Okoboji, Iowa; the Bubbler at Madison Public Library in Madison, Wisconsin; Artist Campaign School in Chicago, Illinois; Proyecto’ace in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Museo de Arte Moderno in Chile. They are a TEDx Madison speaker and gave a talk entitled The Power and Purpose of Creativity.

Jenie Gao is the recently appointed Executive Director of Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. They live on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

About the Exhibition:

"My mother lives in a rural area of Kansas, threatened in recent years by encroaching suburbanization. Since 2024, my spouse and I have taken turns visiting my mother to help her with house repairs and to assert our presence to overly inquisitive realtors and developers eager to displace older residents.
The centrepiece of this exhibition is a TV tray table in my mother’s home, where we share our meals. In this modest and intimate setting, my mother steps into one of her most profound roles as our family’s knowledge keeper. Her stories—simultaneously historical, allegorical, almost mythic, and sometimes prophetic—come alive.

In one story, my mother explains how she sees herself, brave and capable of doing things alone. When she was a child in Taiwan, her family rented her a third-story bedroom separate from their first floor flat. Every night, she had to ascend the staircase outside into the mountains under the watchful eyes of mountain lions.

The works in this exhibition capture moments when my mother’s stories are suspended between a child’s imagination and an elder’s recollection, one in which there might truly have been lions in Taiwan’s mountains, or perhaps an elusive Clouded Leopard before habitat loss caused them to die out and disappear. The tension of disappearance in these stories alludes to the repeated displacement my own family members, who have lost their homes to multiple occupying governments across generations.

The mountain lions of my mother’s childhood ended up being feral cats. Yet for a moment, as she passes her stories to my stewardship and safekeeping, the common becomes mythic.
Via this work, I interweave the personal and political, to strengthen local-global perspectives of colonization's impact. I share my family’s stories as a frame through which we can better understand one another as different peoples connected through shared struggles—and shared imaginings for something beyond what our stories seem to be."