Steven Beckly

“Dad didn’t talk about his wartime experiences” is a comment often made by the children of veterans when presenting sets of medals or journals to military memorabilia experts on programs like the Antiques Roadshow. As an ever-diminishing number of people who lived through the two world wars remain alive, and even those who served more recently in the Korean, Vietnam and Afghanistan conflicts are now entering their 70s and 80s, opportunities to document their personal experiences of war are slipping away. By preserving the stories of those who fought on the front lines or experienced war as civilians, we gain a greater understanding of the true costs of conflict and the contradictions that make us human.

The photographs in Toronto-based Steven Beckly’s recent exhibition, “Handy Work,” are a means of sharing one such story, that of the artist’s father. In 1963, Beckly’s father was in his early 20s when he was drafted by the Chinese army for military service during the Vietnam War. Being good with his hands, he became a munitions technician at a factory that produced weapons for the Chinese-backed North Vietnamese government. He credits this manual dexterity with saving his life.

Following the war, the Beckly family, along with grandparents, aunts and uncles, emigrated to Canada. As a youth, Beckly was more interested in assimilating than learning about his family’s history in China, and his father didn’t talk about his wartime experiences. It was not until his dad was almost 80 that Beckly realized he should learn more. These conversations resulted in a single photograph for the exhibition “Conversations with Elders” held by the Asian Arts and Culture Trust in 2022. The photograph, which also appears in “Handy Work” and shares its title, depicts his father’s hands forming a mudra, a Buddhist gesture symbolizing the cyclical nature of learning and existence. On one hand, he wears brass accessories that extend the length of his pinky and third finger. Taking the form of bullets, in reference to his father’s wartime profession, their surfaces are embossed with designs based on rippling water and leaves—beauty and brutality brought together.

These two accoutrements along with a finger-length articulated ring and a pair of conjoined rings—all designed by Beckly with the assistance of Toronto jewellery designer Valerie Lamiel—inspired the expansion of the 2022 photograph into a series. The articulated ring is embossed with Beckly senior’s military staff ID number—62156227—and embellished with jade. The artist wears the ring in a photograph showing him pointing to a tattoo on his arm of the same mudra made by his father in the Handy Work image, illustrating a generational and spiritual link. In other photos, Beckly’s hands appear alongside his father’s. In Hidden Power, their hands mirror each other, their thumbs and pinkies touching and the bullet-shaped finger pieces extending their middle fingers. In a trio of similarly sized works—Twist of Fate, in which their pinkies are attached by the conjoined rings, Covert Tactics and Shading the Truth—their hands form expressive shapes against backdrops of camouflage material: fingers are extended and palms face outward, the positions hands take when giving a blessing or extending a welcome. Never is there a closed fist.

The series’ largest photograph, A Different Speed, feels like an outlier though it derives from Beckly’s father’s story of how Chinese officials conducted tests to determine how he might react under stressful situations. Beckly was reminded of the experiments conducted by NASA scientists in the 1950s in which spiders were monitored spinning webs after they had been given mind-altering drugs such as LSD and mescaline. The web constructed by Beckly in fine gold chain—a material he has often used—re-creates the one made by a spider given Benzedrine. The web’s lack of symmetry and profusion of gaps, in the context of this body of work, is perhaps indicative of the unreliability of long-accepted historical narratives—the holes that individuals can have in their memories, or things they’d rather forget. Despite these flaws, however, such structures manage to remain intact.

It feels like Beckly is unpacking two paradoxes in these photographs. The first is contained within his father’s hands: once used (however unwillingly) to make weapons and support a war effort, they are now portrayed as instruments of spirituality, healing and creativity. His hands forming Buddhist gestures of harmony and goodwill, or entwining with his son’s against the camouflage fabric, suggest humanity’s contradictory impulses: to love or to hate, to fear differences or embrace them, to share knowledge or withhold it, to find reasons to continue fighting or to use that energy to work towards peace.

Second, parent-child dynamics can be riddled with contradictions: parents want to know their children (and vice versa), but, paradoxically, there is sometimes an impulse to keep difficult experiences to oneself. Like many veterans, Beckly’s father had a camaraderie with his wartime colleagues and was more comfortable talking about his past with strangers or others who had similar experiences than with his own family. Trauma and hardship—whether stemming from war or other experiences—can become obstacles to forming healthy relationships across generations. Parents may want to protect their children from such knowledge or, depending on the circumstances, they may fear being judged or pitied by them. Others may simply feel that the past belongs in the past. Beckly’s engagement with his father as documented in these photographs is thoughtful and poignant, a demonstration that leading with trust, openness and generosity makes acceptance and understanding possible, not just within the bounds of familial relationships but also on more universally human—and humane—levels. ❚

“Handy Work” was exhibited at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, from May 1, 2025, to June 14, 2025.

Bill Clarke is a Toronto-based writer and editor who has also contributed to ArtReview, ARTnews, Modern Painters and Canadian Art.