sculpture / installation
Tasty Rock Farm, 2024
Latcham Art Centre, Stouffville, Ontario. Shown as part of a group show.
In ‘like heirlooms’ curated by Tyler Durbano, Morris Lum, Joy Wong, and Stephanie Yee bring together large-scale photographs with installation and sculptural works that use experimental materials like MSG and symbiotic cultures of bacteria and and yeast (SCOBY). Through these ingredients, food preparation techniques, and vivid images, their distinct ways of working connect aspects of food culture that are significant to Chinese diaspora communities with intangible assets like care, authenticity, and belonging.
Tasty Rock Farm, invites viewers into a fictional tourist attraction where monosodium glutamate (MSG) is harvested from nature. With the sound of waves crashing in the background, visitors are greeted by a voice welcoming them to explore the “artisanal” process for making MSG.
From exhibition essay by curator Tyler Durbano:
Using a combination of real and fabricated materials, Yee presents a space akin to a tourist site, where people often come to learn historic facts taken in without question. Though it is difficult for one artwork to address something as weighty as longstanding prejudice toward Chinese Canadians, Yee's humourous installation has cracked that door open. Tasty Rock Farm is an environment where everything is up for questioning and wonder, facilitating a deeper contemplation of how cultural perceptions and knowledge are constructed and disseminated. It extends beyond a commentary on MSG to provoke deeper questions about authenticity. What makes Chinese food authentic is not merely its ingredients but the stories, traditions, and cultural contexts that are interwoven with local influences. Yee presents authenticity as transformational, and like recipes that change with time, diasporic communities maintain their authenticity through the lived experiences and adaptations of their people. By challenging oversimplified notions of authenticity, Yee highlights the complex and fluid identities of Chinese Canadians, celebrating their resilience and continual transformation.
Exhibition photos by: Dennis Hristovski.
EAT IT UP, 2022
Oxygen Art Centre, Nelson, BC - Residency and Exhibition in collaboration with Angela Glanzmann
Expanding on our own histories, ethnicities, and social positions, this exhibition invited viewers behind the scenes into the weird and obscure world of competitive cooking reality TV. The installation took place on the set of a fictional show EAT IT UP!, complete with a presentation table, competitor’s kitchen stations, and pantry/food storage. Constructed out of common household supplies, the food sculptures spoke to the resourcefulness and resilience of their ancestors as they had to adapt to new cultures and customs.
Exhibition Photos by: Thomas Nowa
Nocturne Halifax
Swaying, rippling and catching wind, this open air installation refers to the traditional Chinese dragon dance. Presented without the typical clues of celebration, a 30 foot long dragon constructed of clear tarp suspends within a scaffold structure. Through a range of movement, this work portrays the moments of strength and uncertainty for an identity in progress.
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The sight and sounds of construction echo around the city. The hollow clanking of scaffold. The rippling of tarp. These are familiar. It is progression. It is reinvention. It is erasure. This installation takes these materials and all their meanings to tell a story about culture and identity.
Within a scaffold structure, hangs a long serpentine figure made of tarp. This figure refers to the Chinese dragon dance. Performed at Lunar New Year celebrations, a choreographed troupe physically animates the long dragon body bringing a sense of collective power, positivity and good luck to the festive crowds who surround.
But what happens when you remove people from culture?
What is lost when cities demolish or take away space -physical or spiritual?
What happens if space for connection, growth and exploration was never provided or allowed?
The concept of this work came from a place of reflection within a time of uncertainty. It stems from a place of internal processing and questioning, eventually moving from isolation, to solidarity and assembly. While the dragon featured in this installation hangs and dances without the support of people, the spiritual and physical creation involved many voices and hands including that of artist Lux Habrich.
As the dragon ebbs and flows with changing winds and air currents, it brings to life the power and potential of the in-between. Swaying, deflated, full and almost taking flight, this work highlights the complexities and nuance within a story of resilience. Giving space to all the possibilities, it acknowledges the ways we can and do exist in the liminal.
Fountain, 2020
Dalhousie Art Gallery “Gut Feeling” Curated by Wes Johnston and Angela Glanzmann
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"YA GOTTA HAVE A WATER FEATURE! EVERY OTHER CHINESE PLACE HAS ONE!"
In what world would a sweet and sour sauce fountain exist? Would it even work? Who would attempt to make it?
Yee's absurdist Fountain imagines an amateur maker and their creation at a time before questions of food and authenticity were on the minds of North American diners. Referencing the visual decor of a 1990s Chinese Canadian restaurant, Yee's work confronts the lasting cultural and aesthetic legacies that emerged from the xenophobic policies put upon Chinese restauranteurs. Mandated by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese food establishments were required to be "high grade" and they responded by creating a visual experience that emphasized exoticism and Orientalism.
Yee's practice is rooted in narrative and creating encounters with objects from imagined times and spaces. Growing up in the 90s, Yee observed how sweet and sour sauce was synonymous with North American Chinese cuisine. She is interested in interrogating how tastes (both appetite and aesthetic) are shaped by white clientele –a literal sugar coating of culture. With Fountain, Yee is looking to reclaim sweet and sour sauce at a time when it is considered a signifier of cheap and inauthentic food.
Group Show Curated and Performed by Caleb Hung and Stephanie Yee
Please join us as GreatLife! celebrates its grand opening week!
From July 28th-August 2nd, “GreatLife!” will be on exhibit at the Anna Leonowens Gallery. Inspired by a fitness franchise, this performance exhibition will use corporate marketing tactics to explore what the good life really is, and how arts and culture can play a part.
Those familiar with the gallery at NSCAD’s Granville Campus know that its cobblestoned street and Victorian architecture are a combination unique to Halifax and stands as a testament to the preservation of the city’s history. Unfortunately, to make room for a new vision of Halifax, much of the city’s arts, culture and heritage are being stripped away. This cultural divide stands at the site of our exhibit where at the doors of the gallery, visitors can look across the street to see that within the historic Barrington Place now resides a GoodLife Fitness, the franchise’s newest and largest location in Canada. Our exhibit takes advantage of the site-specific context as we not only think about the cultural history of our city, but also as we engage in a philosophical discussion about what the “good life” means and how that could be achieved.
The GoodLife Fitness club stands as a wonderful model for GreatLife! as it looks at how the arts and cultural sector could potentially also become a strong and expansive industry. The success of GoodLife is their ability to weave lifestyle-philosophy and ideals into their marketing. With their slogan, “The good life. Made easy,” they imply that a utopian life can be obtained simply through the purchasing of a membership. This promise of the good life is what sets them apart from other gyms. Using these marketing tactics and applying them to arts and culture, this exhibit will ultimately examine what we understand as the good life and how or if that can be achieved.
Where GoodLife targets the body in the process of attaining self-fulfillment, “GreatLife!” will be an environment that promotes the exercising, expressing and expanding of the mind. To challenge the “easy”, attainability of the good life, the experience of the exhibit will be like allowing audience members at a theatrical production to join the cast on the stage and to explore that created world. Upon entering the 988 sq ft store front space, viewers will immediately be greeted with complimentary iced water and smoothies, art work, videos, promotional brochures, lush tropical plants, meditative fountains and free branded apparel and tote bags. While at the front desk, visitors will learn about the exhibition from informational pamphlets, as well as have the opportunity to sign up for “orientation” tours, daily “classes”, and our GreatLife! Stories public talks.
The community has a large role in engaging in the exhibit not only in their roles as visitors and participants, but as active contributors as well. GreatLife! is proud to feature works and presentations by Kyle Martens, Brandon Brookbank, Laura Baker-Roberts, Angela Glanzmann, Andrew Maize, Jessica Wiebe, Andrew Rabynuik, Caitlyn Secondcost, Maddie McNeely, Adrienna Matzeg and Nathanael Jones, as well as the owners and operators Caleb Hung and Stephanie Yee. Through art and public talks, GreatLife! will ultimately speak of the unattainability of the all-encompassing “good life” by presenting to the community how subjective the idea is.
Though we will be humorously mimicking and referring to the visual and cultural language of the gym institution, the space will not function as a gym, or business. The point is to illustrate that there is value in arts and culture in Halifax, and that that value is not always monetary. This value should be evident in the experiences, morals and actions of a society.
Cling Free, 2015 - Hermes Gallery, Halifax
Blanket Fort George, 2014 - The Craig Gallery, Dartmouth
Our Little Dumpling, 2012 - The Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax
Be Safe, 2011 - Halifax Common