Notice Board

Do Weeds Still Grow in Heaven?
Art NOW talk featuring Lan "Florence" Yee
January 27 | Noon | University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome

This lecture goes through the multiple disciplines and projects that have culminated into Lan "Florence" Yee's exhibition, Do Weeds Still Grow in Heaven?, on view at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery from January 25 to April 12, 2025. The body of work brings together text-based art, painting, installation, and textile images as personal and historical characters in a story about survivorship. As a taxonomic category, weeds are not an actual species of plant, but a behaviour of appearing and thriving in a place where they are unwanted. Do Weeds Still Grow in Heaven? features the kinship of weeds with racialized queerness/transness, viewed with hostility as undesirable or unorganizable excess, running parallel to the neglected existence of abuse within queer communities. The exhibition surfaces issues of legibility, archival evidence, cyclical knowledge losses, and attempts to reorient towards hope. 

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 Art Museum at The University of Toronto (2024), the Textile Museum of Canada (2023-24), the Darling Foundry (2022), the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), 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. 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. Lan’s artwork is represented by Zalucky Contemporary.

Image: Lan “Florence” Yee, for the cracks, silk and steel wire, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Thank you to SAAG for their collaboration on this talk.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
The artist would also like to acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.