Standards of Collaboration: Lan Florence Yee at Work

Lan Florence Yee describes themselves as a “visual artist and serial collaborator.” Speaking with Yee over Zoom, this entanglement of individual and community practice became clear. Each question I asked prompted a narrative outpouring of the experiences, encounters, and relationships that were the conditions of possibility for their work. As Yee carefully noted friendships, kindnesses, and shared pleasures, I came to see these references to community as acts of citation, a gesture woven into their practice at large. 

Yee’s 2022 exhibition “Sharp Tools for Unripe Fruit,” at their alma mater Dawson College in Montréal, was accompanied by a reading group for students at the college, where participants collectively read parts of Handbook: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education, published in 2017 and edited by Anthea Black and Shamina Chherawala. Yee recounted coming across this book at an orientation fair and being gifted a copy. Bringing this book back to Dawson College—where they themselves had been a student—brought about an exploration of how to transform or adapt in relation to new exhibition spaces: something that, for Yee, appears to happen both at the level of the installation and in their commitment to community-building. These activities are part of Yee’s broader practice of exploring how communities are formed, and they take evident delight in the possibility of learning from others. 

Representing communities in formation challenges the process of representation itself. Yee asks, “how do we hold space for the unrecorded, the unrecordable, and the yet-to-be-recorded?”​​¹ In 2019, Yee took part in an artist residency with the Gay Archives of Québec, part of a project to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada. Describing the experience of viewing collections at the archive, Yee noted how strikingly happenstance community archival processes can be. Friendships and community networks provide the guiding forces for the formation of a newly institutional collection. And yet, as Yee points out, “the form of the archive itself still retains the structure of the problem: their own inherently limiting boundaries of authority, (in)accessibility, ethnographic classification, and penchant towards legible representation.”​​² There are limits to the liberatory potential of auto-archival processes. 

Selected Hauntings (2018) is made of a grouping of embroidered textile panels hung in what the artist describes as a “labyrinthine installation.” Yee embroidered each panel with phrases plucked from the world and written down in the Notes app of their phone. Describing the way these words make their way into the work, Yee notes “I am unsure why these words/statements matter to me or why they stick with me. However, I am deeply interested in understanding myself. Most of the time when I take notes it’s not really for my practice. It’s for me, but sometimes they end up in my work.”​​³ The embroidered Times New Roman phrases are suspended in ambiguity, embodied in the gauzy transparency of the organza surface that holds them. With phrases like “the true language of diaspora is a badly romanized one,” Yee addresses the formation of a queer diasporic identity, navigating what they describe as “the anxiety of self-orientalism and acceptance.” 

The use of hand embroidery repeats in How to Give Ghosts a Sunburn (2021). Among other works, the series features inkjet print photographs on cotton voile fabric with hand-embroidery, hung from the ceiling. The photographs each feature some moment or remnant of an exchange—a tangerine peel (a form to be revisited), a recipe book, hands sharing berries. The printed fabric photographs are embroidered with a diagonal watermark of the word “proof” repeating across the image and a colour bar in the bottom right corner. A watermark is a ubiquitous yet curious feature of digital images, a signal that must be transparent enough to allow the image to be seen but also obscuring enough to mark the image as property while tethering it to its origin. While these visual cues reference standardized formats of exchange like postage stamps, cheques, and paper currency to secure against counterfeit, here their digital status marks their bearers as somehow too mobile, too exchangeable. Like the watermark, the standardized colour bar is similarly a marker of an image in process, a symbol of quality control, and a measure against a pre-established visual standard. Citing these digital artifacts through photography and embroidery, Yee interpolates standardization and ownership. The artist’s hand takes up the work of tying image to origin, mooring each piece as a remnant of the interaction between self and community via the duration of its making. 

Tangerine, after Grapefruit (in progress), riffing on Yoko Ono’s infamous book of performance scores, features Yee’s own scores hand-embroidered in dark blue thread on large swathes of cream-coloured linen. “DISSAPOINTMENT PIECE/ Sigh in at least seven different tones/ Summer 2021,” says one. Blowing up the scores beyond the page of the book or notecard, Yee nonetheless draws on the hand-crafted quality of Ono’s original 1966 book, which was self-published in Tokyo. Some of Yee’s texts are installed on copper pipe frames jutting out from a wall. Others are neatly folded up and stacked in a pile, occluding their contents while recreating gallery furniture like the plinth. On the visible sheets of fabric, we see the density of the embroidery slowly fade towards the bottom of the text, like a printer running out of ink. Describing the genesis of this new body of work, Yee recounts taking Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit out of the university library. The book of conceptual event scores, or instructions for living, became a cherished reference point. Later, a close friend replaced the library copy with a new copy, inserting a note, styled after Ono’s cards. This sequence—a concept, a fermentation, an exchange, or in other words: an idea, a meditation, a friendship—seems to lie behind each of Yee’s projects. 

To make these acts of exchange even more concrete, the shape of a delicately unfurling ceramic tangerine peel invites the viewer to “please help yourself.” A collaborative project with artist Arezu Salamzadeh, the tangerine references the traditions of hospitality used by Cantonese people to welcome guests to their home. In Yee’s words, the collaborative work is intended to be a kind of “alternative monument,” choosing to “emphasize collectivity and care.” The pair also worked together on an artwork called the Chinatown Biennial in 2021, “part actual biennial and part parody,” drawing on a tradition of institutional critique to question the established narratives and aesthetics of Chinatowns. Yee has also recently edited a risograph printed book of essays entitled A Haphazard Handbook of Artists and Organizers Across Chinatowns, which features essays and conversations around six different Chinatowns. In each of these exchanges, an idea is assembled, expanding outwards to take shape within community. Whether at the level of the individual work or collaborative exhibition project, Yee makes sure that each project is an act of community-building. In doing so, they continually reorient themselves in relation to the world. 

Emily Doucet is a writer and researcher based in Tiohtià:ke/ Montréal. 

1. Lan Florence Yee, “Sharp Tools For Unripe Fruit.” Warren G. Flowers Art Gallery, Dawson College, March 2022.
2. Lan Florence Yee, “Sharp Tools For Unripe Fruit.” 
3. Sabrina Schmidt and Victoria Petrecca-Berthelet, “Interview with Lan Florence Yee,” March 2022, https://www.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/news/uncategorized/forence-yee-sharp-tools-for-unripe-fruit/.

This article is published in issue 39.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue