ELUSIVE DESIRES: NESS LEE + lan FLORENCE YEE

Organized by the Varley Art Gallery of Markham

Curated by Marissa Largo

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

Marissa Largo (she/her) is a scholar, curator, and artist whose work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, settler colonialism, and Asian diasporic cultural production. Her forthcoming book, Unsettling Imaginaries: Filipinx Contemporary Artists in Canada (University of Washington Press) examines the work and oral histories of artists who imagine Filipinx subjectivity beyond colonial logics. She is co-editor of the ground-breaking anthology Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries. She serves as the Canada Area Editor of the Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. Marissa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Art and Art History at York University.