OCAD student challenges others ‘to see who I am’
Stein Wang’s assignment, part of annual graduate exhibition, confronts hiring managers’ biases
Stein Wang has a resumé that cannot be overlooked.
Part irony and part political statement against employers’ hesitance to interview and hire candidates with Asian names, the OCAD University industrial design graduate has created a resumé that confronts hiring managers’ biases against jobseekers with non-Anglicized names.
To be able to read Wang’s curriculum vitae, viewers must stretch their eyes outward with their hands in order to be able to recognize the letters in a font that he developed that can only be properly viewed through what he calls the “slanty eyes” that most Asians have.
“People cast others based on stereotypes and biases. Employers look past you by your name and don’t really see who you are,” said Wang, 27, referring to recent Canadian studies that found recruiters are less likely to offer job interviews to applicants with Asian names. “Now, they have to make an effort to see who I am.” The mock resumé created by Wang, whose Chinese name is Zhenyu, is his graduation assignment — and part of Canada’s arts and design university’s annual Graduate Exhibition that will showcase the talents of its more than 900 graduating students.
This year’s show runs from May 3 to 7 across the three buildings on its downtown campus.
Admission is free. Many of the pieces in the exhibit showcase the cultural diversity and experiences of the graduating class.
“Increasingly, from the public sector to large corporations, leaders are turning to artists and designers to explore the human interface of their products and services and solve problems,” said Sara Diamond, OCAD’s president and vice-chancellor.
“I’m so proud to show Toronto the accomplishments of this group of talented creative thinkers who have grown and flourished with the support of the university’s faculty and academic staff, experts in their respective fields.” Wang, who came to Canada from China in 2009, said he was initially interested in exploring transnational parenting and intergenerational child care for his final project, given his personal experience as someone born in New York and raised by his grandparents in China before moving to Canada.
However, the potential delays in getting consent from young subjects drove him to focus on employment barriers faced by adult immigrants. Then he came across the media reports on academic studies about how job candidates with Asian names had much lower interview callback rates than others with Anglo names.
With the idea of creating a resumé as his centrepiece conceived, Wang happened to read a story about how an Asian man in Australia had his passport photo rejected because facial recognition software insisted his eyes were closed and it didn’t meet the criteria.
“To develop the font (for the resumé), I put tape on my eyes and stared at things. There was a lot of eye-stretching,” Wang said with a chuckle.
“I made different fonts and tested them on my friends, three Chinese and one Caucasian. It’s a lot of trial and error.”
The OCAD show also includes multimedia exhibits such as the imagery by grad student Mariam Magsi that focuses on women in burkas, the fullcover veil worn by some Muslim women.
Magsi, who grew up in Pakistan with a mother who loved photography, said she was fascinated by women wearing the burka.
“I love travel photography. The scene that I couldn’t get out of mind was a family of women in burkas walking on an unpaved road, carrying grocery bags in hand. What drew me to them was the rhinestones on their shoes and embroideries on their burkas. That’s the way they expressed themselves,” she recalled.
“Here in Canada, we have so much hatred against the people who wear identity markers like burkas and hijabs.”
During her research, not only did Magsi discover from her family that her own maternal great grandmother was a burqa-wearing matriarch, but she travelled to Pakistan, Morocco, Dubai and across Canada to photograph and interview women in burkas.
The result was her photography collection called “Purdah,” which means “to veil, to wear enveloping clothing” in Persian and Urdu.
“Photography has the power for social change and it can shift perceptions,” said the Karachi native, 31, adding that she hopes the storytelling and images can inspire viewers to question their own assumptions and biases against women in burkas.
Grad student Thomas Haskell, a European creole born and raised in Trinidad, said the Carnival is big part of his life and he was shocked when he first came to Toronto in 2008 and his white friends would not take part in the Caribana because “it is a black festival.”
“It struck me because it’s not about black culture but Trinidadian culture.
“It’s made up of Africans, Indians, Chinese, Europeans. Everyone just comes together to celebrate in a beautiful way,” said Haskell, 28.
To enlighten his Canadian audience, he created the “Mas-QueerAid” collection of sculptures that are inspired by the folklore of the annual carnival showing his multi-faceted heritage.
The piece he is showing is called Colonalisa, which features the crowns and Columbus ships that symbolize colonialism and the trailing blood and sugarcane that represent the history of slavery and plantation.
“The Caribbean identity is always a process in making,” Haskell said. “There is always the entanglement and criss-crossing of history.”