Lan Florence Yee

Event Description

Lan Florence Yee is a visual artist and serial collaborator based in Toronto and Montreal. They collect text in underappreciated places and ferment it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Lan’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), the Art Gallery of Ontario (2020), the Textile Museum of Canada (2020), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), and many others. Along with Arezu Salamzadeh, they co-founded the Chinatown Biennial in 2020. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U.

“My current art practice revolves around text and labour-intensive creation as a method of ‘working’ through the restrictive belonging we may seek from labour, language, and family.  As “hard work” is a normative measurement of value, my practice uses the contradictions of recognition to explore how we may queer diasporic desirability. Cynical, my work recognizes the danger of nostalgia's sentimental streak as an unjustly flattening one. It seeks to deromanticize queer, racialized experiences and destabilize linear narratives of intergenerational knowledge by showcasing failure, futility, repetition, and dead ends. My text-based pieces borrow the institutional pen of templates, academia, and forms, while displacing their functions through distrustful lived experiences. The works use ironic and humorous tones to acknowledge the limits of their own structure, and to sustain a necessary uncertainty. The intimacy of this doubt gives me the space to interrogate the multiple losses that make up diasporic memory. ” Lan Florence Yee 

Learn more about the artist 

Rules:

• Don't bring food and beverages.
• Enjoy the event!

Merci and see you soon! 

Partners: 

• Pedagogical resources and activities are available for field trips.