kev liang
The workshop on Saturday, July 8 from 2 PM to 9 PM invites attendees to “add oil” by participating in an act of self-digestion and personal vow, making through the lens of their own experiences with family, place, and identity done through silk screening a rice bowl emblem onto a tarp, which will build itself into a collective record of “digestions”.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kev Liang is an emerging artist based in Edmonton, Treaty 6 territory, with 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, and more, with an upcoming solo exhibition opening at Calgary’s The New Gallery in January 2024. He tackles his homo/queer, diasporic 2nd-gen Chinese-Canadian identity and its existential anxieties of lineage and prosperity within the Anthropocene. Kev was a Production Assistant for The Works International Visual Arts Society, a Gallery Associate for dc3 Art Projects, and an intern for Latitude 53. He is currently interested and involved in community-based artistic projects concerning Edmonton’s Chinatown such as Chinatown Greetings and AIYA Collective and will continue to seek opportunities to contribute towards our own communities as well as expand artistically elsewhere.
Jiā yóu/Just add oil: Portals of Nowhere
Sir Winston Churchill Square
Kev Liang, Just add oil; I feel cold. (Floor Tarp Detail), 2022, Polyethylene tarp and 3D printing
ARTIST STATEMENT
Outside of the laborious hot kitchen of my family’s small Chinese restaurant in the rural secluded prairies, structures like concrete and metallic grain elevators, and orientalist yet colonial facades of Chinatown gateways are things that I have distractedly gazed upon since childhood. These industrial aesthetics of our contemporary and anthropocentric time are something that I am both fascinated and haunted by. It has become a reflection of personal anxieties relating to “success” and “prosperity” as I am seeing the endless capitalistic ideals that may threaten us.
Industrial plastic tarps withstand time and tear. Through designed recontextualization, they resist as a social material against dark clouds of generational pain to remind us of space for kin and care in the moment. Blue against the obligatory, yet celebratory, Chinese red: a “queerness” coming from my own homo/queer diasporic 2nd-gen Chinese-Canadian perspective that can be a slow but impactful way of finding alternative modes of power and resilience. This is especially true for myself when thinking about the act of archiving past histories or lineage and the “pro-creating” of future relations through the media of a synthetic oil-based material existing in Albertan “oil country”. Using food-related emblems such as rice bowls, chopsticks, and gritty family-owned woks repetitively printed on long-lasting yet ephemeral synthetic materials, I reflect on guilt, generational trauma, and the incessant act of self-digestion. Simultaneously, I find alternative modes of care and resistance as a queer entity when it comes to fighting blood-related angst such as achieving procreation and so-called prosperity for demanded future offspring. We will always have to just keep working, just keep digesting, and just add oil. This is a testament to our resilience in the face of generational adversity.
