Evoking ancestral resilience at a moment of political exhaustion, I sighed my mother’s ancient sigh combines an image of the heavens (天) above Chinatown with a quote from Salt Fish Girl (2002), a novel by the queer Chinese Canadian writer Larissa Lai, who received her PhD from the University of Calgary, is currently a professor at University of Toronto. Taking aesthetic inspiration from local signage, the billboard bears witness to the strength and struggles of an Asian diasporic community which has survived violence, colonialism, erasure, and forced migration.

This work is a continuation of Because Freedom, a collaborative project with C. Ryu.