PIA is proud to support the practice of Lan Florence Yee and their upcoming exhibition Which came first, the home or the stranger? at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, ON).

Yee’s practice has long been concerned with the act of reproduction—copying, re-tracing, commodifying, and forging. These processes mirror the artist’s investigation of diasporic iconography from their childhood homes in tandem with the globalized desires that drive their replication. The artist’s use of oil painting on canvas follows this pattern by intentionally displacing the original paper-based ink artwork through a shift in materiality. The displayed paintings are surrounded by stacks of folded cotton canvas that expose only the edges of unstretched paintings, hinting at what is still unknown and unseen in the gaps of our archives.

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.