One striking image, Super Snick, shows two young Black American boys playing in the streets of Atlanta in the late ’60s, proudly donning capes with their arms raised like superheroes. They were supporters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and their courage and joy embody the spirit that pulses through Enemy Alien.

Wong also created a playlist of songs inspired by Wakayama, featuring Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Tupac—artists whose music served as anthems for the civil rights and anti-war movements.

Like Wakayama, Wong is also an activist and has been a pioneer in experimental video, photography, and multimedia art in Canada for over four decades. He has curated several exhibitions highlighting underrepresented artists, and began organizing exhibitions by and for Asian artists in the late ’80s, spaces that didn’t previously exist in Canadian art institutions. That same commitment to inclusion continues in Enemy Alien, which feels as much about now as about then.

“Thirty years later there’s still such a lack of other types of voices within what has always been a Eurocentric art history. So there was a lot of resistance from funding agencies,” Wong recalls. “This was in the late eighties. I had a top curator tell me, ‘you’re a really good artist, you don’t need to be doing this.’ I got called reverse racism. I held onto how it was never about you. It was about getting a chance to talk with each other and to develop a new audience, new art, new community. It was not about taking over.”

Thanks to Wong, history endures through Enemy Alien. Wakayama, who passed away in 2018, was a photographer and activist who chronicled the Civil Rights Movement in the Southern United States, the Japanese Canadian Redress, the Doukhobors in British Columbia, and Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan.

“He is somebody who never made work for galleries,” Wong says. “He always made work for periodical magazines, posters. He was never a gallery artist. He was never noticed or accepted in those spaces…The mere fact that he lived in Strathcona and they knew nothing about him on this side of town, says volumes.”

That outsider status and desire for connection is an integral part of Wakayama’s story. Born in 1941 in British Columbia, he and his family were among the 22,000 Japanese Canadians forcibly relocated and interned during World War II. That early experience of displacement shaped the lens through which he would document communities across North America. In 1963, Wakayama traveled to the Southern United States to join the SNCC, photographing voter registration drives, trainings, and protests—capturing the everyday lives of those enduring systemic oppression with dignity.

Wong then reflects on his own path. “The story begins when I went back to China in 1982. I was trying to understand it from my point of view,” he says. “I was trying to make stories, art, documentation, and I didn’t see anything that represented the kinds of questions I was looking for answers to. I started to look around for what other Asian Americans and Asian Canadians were doing. There wasn’t a lot, but what I did see was inspiring.”

Through Enemy Alien, Wong reframes Wakayama’s legacy for a new generation. “These places purport to represent all and didn’t know him,” he says. “This was a real opportunity to share his work with the world through exhibition, through film, and through words. And then to have his archive go off to Stanford—it’s amazing… It’s about taking the time to listen, and now, it’s an opportunity for a lot more people to listen.”

With war and displacement currently defining political life, Enemy Alien feels eerily present. “Enemy Alien—I didn’t make up that title,” Wong says. “That was the official brand given to Japanese Canadians. To others it was that same act that the current US regime is using—the Alien Enemy Act—to deport, to imprison, to incarcerate immigrants or migrants or whoever. It’s a War Measures Act. When the Japanese Canadians were fighting for Redress, they wondered if this would ever happen again. Now, it’s happening again.”

Wakayama’s work offers a perspective that celebrates life despite cruelty and suffering, and the importance of coming together. Enemy Alien functions as a bridge across decades of movements that carry the same message.

“I think there’s always been those creative people, those artists, those voices who have dared to speak up. So that’s nothing new,” Wong says. “It’s possible to make beautiful art that also has difficult content. It can be done and it is being done.”

As images of exile and protest dominate headlines from Gaza to the United States, Enemy Alien feels less like a retrospective and more like a mirror. The exhibit asks: what has changed since Wakayama first picked up his camera in the 1960s? His photographs of people living through oppression can be both a record of disparity and of strength.

Enemy Alien reminds us that recognizing humanity fuels resilience. See it for yourself at the Vancouver Art Gallery from October 3, 2025 through February 22, 2026. Tickets here.