Lan Florence Yee

Lan Florence Yee's visual arts 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, they uses the contradictions of recognition to explore how we may queer desirability. Cynical, their work recognizes the danger of nostalgia's sentimental streak as an unjustly flattening one. They seek to deromanticize queer, racialized experiences and destabilize linear narratives of intergenerational knowledge by showcasing failure, futility, repetition, and dead ends. Yee's 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 them the space to interrogate the multiple losses that make up diasporic memory.

Biography

Lan Florence Yee is a visual artist and serial collaborator based in Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/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 (Toronto, 2021), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, 2020), the Textile Museum of Canada (Toronto, 2020), and the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, 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 University.

Recent exhibitions

2022

Tu m'enveloppes et je te contiens, Group exhibition, Fonderie Darlin Sharper Tools for Unripe Fruit, Neutral Ground, Regina, SK Sharp Tools for Unripe Fruit, Warren G. Flowers Gallery Pelures (with Berirouche Feddal), Bradley Ertaskiran You Listen Better to Echoes, The New Gallery, Calgary, AB Fibreworks 2022, Cambridge Art Galleries, Cambridge, ON Indexing Resistance, the plumb, Toronto, ON PROOF 28, Gallery 44, Toronto, ON Queer Futurities: holding area, Open Space, Victoria, BC It Comes in Waves, University of New-Brunswick Art Centre, Fredericton, NB