​Lingering Archive: Effervescence (2026)

Lingering Archive: Effervescence observes diasporic-inhabited neighbourhoods: Koreatown and Chinatown in Toronto; Itaewon in Seoul—to examine how diasporic presences and their everyday movements shape the aesthetic rhythm and intimacy of urban space. Attentive to storefronts, markets, river paths, gyms, quiet historic sites, and late-night routines, the project considers how belonging is not declared but rehearsed: through repetition, labour, and return.

This project builds on the conceptual inquiries of Cartographies of In-Between, where walking functioned as a method—visualizing diasporic experience through collage and spatial mapping. It is also informed by conversations with JeeMin Kim and by Sheung-King’s performance project Displaced Nostalgia, which reflects poetically on time, memory, and the feeling of home. Here, walking becomes both research and relation: a way of listening to how individuals inhabit the layered time of a city.
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Across 2025, we engaged with six diasporic individuals living in Seoul and Toronto. Each conversation begins simply: What brought you here? How has your body adjusted, speech, gestures, and sense of safety? What does a day look like? One participant describes arriving from Canada in 2016 after studying East Asian Studies, learning to soften sarcasm into careful politeness, opening a vegan restaurant during the pandemic near Mangwon-dong and Hapjeong-dong, and finding belonging along the Han River and in an MMA gym. Another walks daily from OCAD to Fort York, drawn to its quiet historic grounds as a space of solitude. Others speak of long-standing businesses in Koreatown, of markets visited for decades, of prayer at dawn before work, of the necessity of renewing visas, of neighbourhoods sustained by memory and labour.
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Collaborators

JeeMin Kim (b. 1993, Seoul, South Korea) 
JeeMin Kim is an artist with a BA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, an MA in Critical Practice from the Royal College of Art, London, and a PhD in Painting from Hong Ik University. Her ongoing research and solo exhibition series, Prototype Temple, unfolds within constructed stage-like spaces where forms of various civilisations and ruins are layered together. The project questions the fictive nostalgia produced by Western archaeology and colonial perspectives. Kim’s works have also been featured at Horse Hospital Gallery, London (2019), Art Council Korea (2021), Culture Station Seoul 284 & Namsan Library, Seoul (2023), and K&L Museum, Seoul (2024). 

Sheung-King (b. 1994, Vancouver, Canada) 
Sheung-King Aaron Tang is a novelist. His novel, Batshit Seven, published by Penguin Random House, won the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was named one of the best books of 2025 by the Globe and Mail. His debut novel, You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked (Book*hug Press, 2020), is a finalist for the 2021 Governor General's Award, a finalist for the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, longlisted for CBC's Canada Reads 2021, and named one of the best book debuts of 2020 by the Globe and Mail. Sheung-King was born in Vancouver and grew up in Hong Kong.

JeeMin Kim and Sheung-King form a duo whose interdisciplinary art project, Displaced Nostalgia, combines installation, creative writing, and performance. It has been performed internationally, including at InterAccess in Toronto, Platform L’s Live Arts Festival in Seoul, and the Hong Kong Art Basel. Lingering Archives: Effervecence is their third collaboration with Lingxiang Wu. 

Lingering Archive: Effervescence is now distributed through Art Metropole, If you’re interested, you can get a copy through their shop.


This project is supported by Canada Council for the Arts’s
Canada Korea Co-creation Fund in celebration of Canada-Korea Year of Cultural Exchanges.