Yin Mei
您可以爱我吗, 2024
您可以爱我吗 (2024) captures my state of mind just before I came out to my parents as trans. The work is a shrine to grieve my past self and celebrate alternative futures. The pieces that comprise the shrine represent memories in which love and repression, and familial care and immigrant patriarchal misogyny are intertwined. Overall, the work is a cathartic exercise that communicates the complexity of transition and asks the audience “can you love me?”
About the Artist
Yin Mei (She/Her) (b. 2002, Xi’an, China) is an emerging Chinese transfeminine artist practicing in the stolen and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, “Vancouver, BC”, with a focus on photo-based mixed-media and poetry. The core of her work is the exploration of queer Sinophone trans identities, trans experiences, and generational trauma within the context of the Sinophone diaspora. Through the experimentation of combining images, digital spaces, and poetry, Mei pieces together artworks that ask what it means to create and be a custodian of archives, what other non-traditional methods of archiving exists, what it means to depict the trans body as myth, and how to de-center Han supremacy in her work. A major tenet of Mei’s work is the process of queerification—reframing stereotypical narratives that shape our histories by reimagining them as empowering rather than oppressive. By fracturing histories, myths, poor images, and archives, she corrupts their origins and reimposes narratives through a queer lens.