The main series in this theme are hand embroidered interventions on printed fabric. The images of various places and people are related together as subjects that are unable (or unwilling) to be claimed. This unfinished business is embodied by the obstacle of the embroidered PROOF watermarks. Inspired by traditional printmaking processes, the series attempts to hold the desire for archival presence with the problems of its structure.
Even as queer and racialized people are gravitating towards archival practices—from which we were once excluded—the form of the archive itself still retains the structure of the problem: their inherently limiting boundaries of authority, (in)accessibility, ethnographic classification, and penchant towards legible representation. How do we hold space for the unrecorded, the unrecordable, and the yet-to-be-recorded? What if our desire for documentation might be damaging? The challenges of commemoration beckon me to consider what queer theorist Jack Halberstam refers to as “new forms of memory that relate more to spectrality than to hard evidence, to lost genealogies than to inheritance, to erasure than to inscription.”
My text-based pieces borrow the institutional pen of templates, academia, and forms, while displacing their functions through skeptical lived experiences. The works use an ironic and humorous tone to recognize the limits of their own structure, and to sustain a necessary uncertainty. Two of such pieces were made as outdoor responsive installations. The Pseudo-Monument is a vinyl and wooden cube put at the center of Rochford Park in Charlottetown, PEI, questioning the neutrality of all structures through the phrase A MONUMENT IS AN ALTAR; YOUR GLANCES ARE ALL PRAYERS. It accompanies another work that was put a few blocks away. A van with the logo Monument Movers Inc. Disposal and Reparations is parked in front of a bronze cast statue of John A. MacDonald that the city commissioned decades earlier. This fake company is a speculative exercise that manifests the demands of many groups to remove the statue.
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I also want to propose other ways of thinking about commemoration. "Please Help Yourself" is a collection glazed ceramic pieces meant to resemble tangerine peels. The offering of tangerines is reminiscent of the ways that Cantonese people often welcome guests in their home or share with strangers. We propose these inconspicuous leftovers of gatherings as alternative monuments, emphasizing collectivity and care over the history of glorifying individual and colonial exploits. The project also turned into a collaborative endeavour during the pandemic: friends and family received clay in the mail with instructions allowing them to “share a tangerine” with us. The sculptures then also become commemorative objects of loss and longing.
In the Empty / Lucky series, the character 吉 is used as a fabric appliqué on the backs of misprinted photographs, and then installed within the rough framing of timber walls, simulating the hollow structures inside houses. When my grandparents fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, my grandfather was only allowed two suitcases, and he chose to fill it with photo albums. He cherished his family photos so deeply that he labelled the empty spaces in the photo sleeves, so as to not think something was missing from that pocket. Due to cultural superstitions, the word empty 空 in Cantonese is cursed because it is a homonym for the words evil or criminal 兇. Hence, Cantonese speakers will write the character 吉, meaning lucky, auspicious, fortunate, as a textual stand-in for emptiness. Regarding its inclusion in an exhibition about the liberatory possibility of invisibility in trans archives, curator Dallas Fellini writes:
“Here 吉 at once represents a yearning for what might be missing from the archive and a proposal to sit comfortably in absence and unrecordability. Yee responds to and reframes anxiety around an association of emptiness with evil and criminality, instead casting this association into a space of potential. In the context of an archive complicit in the disenfranchisement and antagonizing of racialized trans people, silence holds the ability to become countermythological.”
Much of this work was made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
