This Nuit Blanche, Alvin Luong solves an art mystery that has haunted students for decades

In his new film piece "The Mystery of the Twisted Fantasy" — which will be shown as part of Nuit Blanche Toronto's Etobicoke offerings — multimedia artist Alvin Luong attempts to re-imagine both a mural that's fascinated him for over a decade, and how we talk about Canadian history.

Back in the early 2010s, when Luong was attending Humberside Collegiate in Toronto's west end, the mural that hung in the school's auditorium took on a kind of mythic status.

"The Humberside Mural" — that's its official name — is technically a polyptych. The painting was originally created in 1925 by Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer. It was taken down and kept in storage for decades before being restored in the 1990s, and re-hung in the school in 1992 to celebrate the school's centenary.

The 33-by-141-foot mural was the biggest piece ever done by Lismer. It depicts the founding of Canada in more or less the way you'd expect from a painting from the 1920s.

"It idealizes the colonisation of Canada," Luong says. "It shows the arrival of the Vikings, then the French, then the English. The central panel has European figures in togas, which is quite strange… and then on the right hand side it depicts the construction of Canada, with pioneers. And then the rightmost panel, that's supposed to represent a new generation of Canadians, and they're all white."

But that fifth panel also has a big, obviously missing chunk. According to Luong, that was one of the things that made the mural such an object of curiosity for him and his classmates.

"In my day it was just shrouded in mystery," he says. "People said that when it was in storage, someone slashed [the panel] and it was taken away. It became shrouded in high school lore."

It turned out that none of Humberside's student body's theories were true. The truth was much less interesting. 

"The mural was originally made for a gymnasium that was torn down," he says. "The fifth panel was shaped to fit on the side of a bleacher."

Still, the missing piece of the mural fascinated Luong enough that it made him want to explore what could have been there.

"It felt to me like, this is an insertion point," he says. "This is a [place] for an artist to intervene in this painting, and imagine what could have been in this panel."

Luong constructed a frame in the shape of the missing piece, and then, along with his longtime friend and fellow Humberside alumni Ahmed K, began to muse about what could go in that spot. That is the crux of the project. 

"We recreate that frame, and in there, Ahmed begins to describe what he sees in what is an otherwise unremarkable piece of plastic," he says. "So, we don't ever see what Ahmed is describing, but he makes shapes with his fingers, and we can imagine the outline of what he's describing."

Luong says that the descriptions start off very technical and literal — "'there's a horizon line running through here,' 'there are a bunch of deciduous trees' 'there's a building, taller than it is wide, with clean lines'" — but become more and more personal as Ahmed goes on.

"He ends up describing different shopping plazas that he frequents, and a mosque that he frequents," he says. "He's describing a type of urbanism in the GTA, strip malls, urban sprawl… and he adds personal touches, like how these communities became Somali hubs."

For Luong, he and K — a Vietnamese-Chinese-Canadian and a Somali-Canadian, respectively — are "two people who don't belong" in Lismer's painting, and his goal is to "play with that tension."

"It's a very different vision of what happens on this land than the one Lismer had," he says. "The people that are in this community are not the people who are depicted in the Arthur Lismer painting."

That said, he doesn't want "The Mystery of the Twisted Fantasy" to be seen as in opposition to "The Humberside Mural," but rather as a kind of addition.

"My intention is to have my work be in parallel to this Arthur Lismer work," he says. "I'm responding to the work."