Round Table Discussion: What Comes After?

Thursday, November 18, 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Presented on Zoom, registration is required

Join us for a live virtual round table discussion and catalogue launch. Artists Ness Lee and Florence Yee, along with guest writers Casey Mecija and Elisha Lim, will speculate on how queer Asian diasporic artistic practice is a form of world making. Moderated by Marissa Largo.

Elusive Desires: Ness Lee and Florence Yee
September 25, 2021 to January 2, 2022

Elusive Desires traces the intimacies and (be)longings of two queer Asian diasporic artists: Ness Lee (they/she) and Florence Yee (they/theirs). Both descendants of the Chinese diaspora (Hakka and Cantonese, respectively), Lee and Yee queer mythologies of the nation, settler colonial imaginaries that pervade Canadian art history, and trouble notions of seamless assimilation into a society that leaves much to be desired.

The artists’ desires and affects, as embodied through illustration, painting, installation, embroidery, and sculpture, visualize gendered, sexual, and racial difference, but do so in alluring and sometimes, ironic ways. The promises of affirmation offered by conventional institutions – as in archives, citizenship, and the nuclear family – are elusive for these two artists, who instead, propose affinities, diasporic kinships, and relationalities that centre care and equity.

Elusive Desires seeks to create a space in which the often-obscured subjectivities and intimacies of queer Asian diaspora are brought to the fore in the archive, gallery, and public realm.

Curated by Marissa Largo

This exhibition is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Varley-McKay Art Foundation of Markham, and the City of Markham. Virtual programs are supported by TD Bank Group.