About

Lan “Florence” Yee is a visual artist and cultural worker based in Tkaronto/Toronto & 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 Darling Foundry (2022), the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), the Textile Museum of Canada (2020), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), among others. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U as a Joseph-Armand Bombardier SSHRC scholar. Lan has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Council for the Arts, and the Toronto Arts Council. They are a recipient of the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists (2023). Lan is a member of JIA Foundation as curator of the Chinatown House MTL.

CV 

Contact: lan.they.them@gmail.com

Artist Statement

My interdisciplinary practice draws on writing and unassuming imagery to permeate the slippery ends of meaning. Through a wide range of media, including oil painting, textile embroidery, sculptural installation, electronic signage, and photography, each are grounded together by unearthing speculative bonds between the historical and personal.

My text-based artwork borrows the anonymous pen of templates, signage, and forms, while displacing their functions through skeptical experiences. The often ironic and humorous tones in the language recognize the limits of their own structure, and sustain a necessary uncertainty. The intimacy of this doubt gives me the space to interrogate the echoes that make up queer diasporic memory. Rather than looking at the height of grand moments, I prefer to investigate their systemic origins, and what continues to leak in the aftermath.

The slower methods of creation make way for a process that uses time and materials to “work through” the restrictive belonging we may seek from language, duty, and (re)presentation.  As “hard work” is a main measurement from which racialized & migrant bodies are valued, their practice uses the double-edged sword of visibility and recognition to explore how we may queer desirability. It attempts to step around easy signifiers of legibility with sparse retellings, obscured patterns, and frequent interruptions. Away from the flattening effect of nostalgia, I seek to deromanticize linear narratives of intergenerational knowledge by showcasing awkwardness, repetition and dead ends.