Jiā yóu!: PROCEED WITH CAUTION by Kev Liang
SITE #1:
Sir Winston Churchill Square
Kev Liang
Jiā yóu!: PROCEED WITH CAUTION
Kev Liang, Jiā yóu; PROCEED WITH CAUTION, 2026. Silkscreen on polyethylene tarp, 8 x 6ft.
In Jiā yóu!: PROCEED WITH CAUTION, tarps become the skin of a monumental portal, inviting guests to pass beneath as they enter the festival grounds. The installation echoes makeshift shelters, labour infrastructure, and the improvisational architecture of migrant life. By occupying a public threshold, the work reclaims space for narratives that are often hidden or backgrounded, exploring how environments are mediated by impermanence, in turn shaping our relationships and the shared encounters we experience with others.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“I aim to engage and foreground the often-overlooked narratives of homo/queer and diasporic identities. The tarp then becomes a social material, holding together and containing these fragile worlds that might otherwise fall apart”
In Jiā yóu!: PROCEED WITH CAUTION, tarps become the skin of a monumental portal, inviting guests to pass beneath as they enter the festival grounds. The material may bring to mind its use for camping, rain and ground cover, construction and renovation sites, makeshift shelters, and migrant life. Foregrounding this material at an architectural scale, the work forces reconsideration of similarly ubiquitous yet backgrounded narratives.
By working with tarps—a material that exists between spaces of exposure and temporary protection—I explore how environments are mediated by impermanence, in turn shaping our relationships and the shared encounters we experience with others.
When recontextualized on the festival grounds and installed onto the festival gateway, these tarps reflect the lived experiences that often take place around its use as a material. Transformed through creases and stress marks as it wraps around the large architectural structure, I also remove the tarp further from its context with screen-printed imagery, re-imagining it as an art object. The tarp becomes a record of the lived tension between its utilitarian use and its cultural significance. For me, this tension tells the story of the fragility and resilience of immigrant survival and queer discourse within the settler-colonial spaces that surround us. The tarp is a versatile object; it shelters and protects but also divides and conceals. It is improvisational and can simultaneously create a sense of space, home, and belonging, as well as precarity.
In Jiā yóu!: PROCEED WITH CAUTION, I aim to engage and foreground the often-overlooked narratives of homo/queer and diasporic identities. The tarp then becomes a social material, holding together and containing these fragile worlds that might otherwise fall apart. In this way, the work offers a shared experience, bringing people together to collectively navigate an environment marked by impermanence and survival.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kev Liang is an emerging multidisciplinary artist originally from rural central Alberta. He is currently based in Edmonton, on Treaty 6 territory and has a BFA in Printmaking and Intermedia with Distinction from the University of Alberta. Kev has exhibited at SNAP Gallery, Latitude 53, Art Museum at the University of Toronto for the 2021 BMO 1st! Art award, The New Gallery, Neutral Ground, among others. More of Kev’s work will be featured in a show later this year with Hamilton Artists Inc. in Hamilton, Ontario.
Using lens-based processes, layered print-media, and synthetic materiality, Kev aims to dissect his homo/queer, diasporic 2nd-gen Chinese Canadian identity and his existential anxieties surrounding lineage and prosperity within the Anthropocene and so-called “oil country.” His work grapples with Chinese traditional, cultural, and philosophical expectations around the continuation of blood lineage and his inability, as a queer body, to fulfill those expectations.
Kev has been a Production Assistant and Coordinator for The Works International Visual Arts Society, a Gallery Intern for Latitude 53, a Gallery Attendant for Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre, and an Assessor for the Edmonton Arts Council. He has also been involved in equity-seeking and community-based artistic projects, including working with Chinatown Greetings, IDEE (Innovate, Diversify, Educate, and Empower), Gateway Association, ReYu Paralysis Recovery Centre, and Edmonton Anti-Racism Lab.