PORTALS
Presented in partnership with the 2025 Queer Arts Festival and curated by Diane Hau Yu Wong and Mark Takeshi McGregor, this group exhibition explores “portals” as catalysts for change—points of departure that invite reflection on identity, migration, and the possibilities of reimagined worlds via the works of six Vancouver artists: Arkah अर्ख, Evan Matchett-Wong, Sena Cleave, Miles Saraswat, Christian Yves Jones, and Naomi Maya Leung 梁珮恩. As anti-trans, anti-queer and anti-immigrant rhetoric intensifies across the world, Portals responds to our increasingly dangerous political landscape while asking us to envision futures grounded in resilience, memory, and hope.
CURATORIAL TEXT:
Portals are spaces of passage—thresholds that invite transformation, hold tension, and mark possibility. In the face of intensifying anti-trans, anti-queer, and anti-immigrant rhetoric, this exhibition embraces portals not as an escape, but as spaces for resistance, connection, and renewal. Instead, the 2025 Queer Arts Festival exhibition offers a space to imagine otherwise: a world shaped by multiplicity, care, and reimagined futures.
Diane rolls her eyes whenever Mark tells this story, but the 2025 Queer Arts Festival theme was inspired by her tattoos. The two of us were heading to Arkah’s artist talk back in January and talking about any number of things – including my ongoing struggle to land on a theme – when she rolled up her sleeves to show me her freshly inked tattoos of portals. And that was it. The proverbial lightbulb went off.
This year’s curated exhibition brings together six Vancouver-based artists whose works engage with queerness, migration, memory, and transformation. Through sculpture, painting, video, bookmaking, and installation, these artists explore their intersectional identity as something in motion – formed across borders, shaped by loss, and reclaimed through ritual and relationship.
Sena Cleave’s sculptural works use pine needles, mesh, and thread to explore grief and labour. Using these materials, the sculptures engage with the human and material labour required for acts of support and sustenance. These materials are sourced from friends, workplaces, and family, infused with care and memory. Cleave reflects on how failure isn’t inherently transformative or catastrophic, but simply what follows trying. Pine, long symbolic of endurance, becomes a soft site for contemplating how we live through change, instability, and failure.
Arkah अर्ख’s Pencilled in and Eager, with my head in the sand is a ritualistic and ever changing painting using layered acrylic, watercolour, ink, charcoal, and natural materials on unstretched canvas. The work explores migrant relations with unsurrendered Indigenous land through the lens of a politicized body shaped by colonial borders. As it evolves, the piece reflects rapid movement through time and questions how we map queer temporality while challenging linear, colonial narratives.
Evan Matchett-Wong’s embroidered series blends silhouette, nature, and intersectional symbolism. In the Pyramid Mountain Series, a seated figure watches light shift across a landscape, echoing the artist’s move from Edmonton to Vancouver. The series depicts time and movement, both in the changing light across Pyramid Mountain and in the artist’s own journey to their new home. Porcelain Portraits intertwine Dene and Chinese knowledge systems, connecting the Sacred Medicines and the Four Gentlemen with botanical motifs aligned with the seasons. These Birds of Mine follow a medicine wheel cycle of animal encounters, each bird marking a key life moment – grief, love, renewal, teaching.
Christian Yves Jones’ Where Are You From? is a video work that explores the complexities of diasporic identity through personal memory and photographic narrative. Drawing from his life in the Philippines, New Zealand, and Canada, the artist reflects on the tension and fluidity of belonging to multiple cultures. Initially grouping images by origin, the distinctions gradually blur, revealing identity as an evolving, layered construct. The work invites viewers to reflect on their own diasporic experiences, considering how memory, heritage, and lived realities shape our understanding of self.
Miles Saraswat’s multidisciplinary works explore the complexities of diasporic identity, queerness, and transformation. In झरना CASCADE and EMERGENCE, Saraswat reflects on the loss of language, the myth of multiculturalism, and the fragmented nature of home through textiles and photo collages. Works like BURST OF INTIMACY and QUARTER CENTURY CRISIS extend this inquiry to the body and spirit, examining how queerness, cultural heritage, and perceived femininity intersect. Through cycles of reincarnation, memory, and rebirth, the artist presents identity not as fixed, but as a continual process of becoming. In IN A FLASH OF DEATH and LMFAO GUYS THAT WASN’T ME, Saraswat turns inward, tracing past selves, digital personas, and reincarnated identities to reveal the self as an ever-shifting constellation of memory, conflict, and becoming.
Finally, When Lotus Roots Grow: biomimicry & biotransformations (2025) is a multimedia installation by Naomi Maya Leung 梁珮恩 that reflects on land, ancestry, and intergenerational care. Drawing from memories of their grandmother’s lotus root soup and the rituals that surround family sharing, Leung explores grief and migration as pathways to connection and healing. Integrating familial foods and plant shadows into cyanotype prints, their work reflects on memory, belonging, and the quotidian sacrifices and ceremonies that help us feel grounded.
Portals is both an entry and an invocation. These artists offer visions of transition, resistance, and becoming – reminding us that queer and trans life has always been about crossing thresholds. Each artwork acts as a portal into worlds that reimagine community, lineage, and futurosities beyond colonial and heteronormative frameworks.
What happens when we step through? The answers begin here.
Artist Biographies
Arkah अर्ख (they/them) is a migrant from Delhi, India, living on stolen lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples. They are a visual artist and writer, trying to map spirit as a method of archival. By creating an opening into other possible worlds, Arkah is seeking answers. How do we trudge on, despite uncertainty? When visiting home, they work as an art teacher and muralist.
Sena Cleave (she/they) is an artist exploring ideas of work, reciprocity, and ongoing change. Their sculptural practice draws on their family history of farming, experiences working day jobs, and participation in domestic labour and care. Often using materials found in these settings, they investigate alternative methods of support and sustenance. Cleave lives in the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations, and was raised between Snuneymuxw and Snaw’naw’as territories and Osaka, Japan.
Christian Yves Jones (he/him) is a Philippine-born, New Zealand-raised filmmaker and video artist based in Vancouver, BC. He graduated with a Bachelor of Communication Studies from Auckland University of Technology (New Zealand), where he was awarded a Vice Chancellor’s Scholarship. His work spans a wide range of formats, including music videos, short films, video art films, and live television broadcasts. Christian’s creative practice often explores stories from the LGBTQ+ community and the Asian diaspora in the West.
Naomi Maya Leung 梁珮恩 (they/them) is a Han Cantonese settler, climate justice education facilitator and organizer, and mixed media artist. Naomi desires to create anti-colonial spaces centering trans and queer diaspora to process intergenerational trauma, grief, and to co-create possibilities and programming for hope and healing. Naomi studies BSc Global Resource Systems and Psychology, integrating climate change studies with global health, climate emotions, and the Asian diaspora.
Evan Matchett-Wong (they/them) is a self-taught hand embroidery artist from Edmonton in Treaty 6 Territory in Canada, now living in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. They are of Chinese (Han), Indigenous (Dene), and Irish descent. They are Two-Spirit and a member of Cold Lake First Nations. They have been doing hand embroidery since 2014, and have brought the use of watercolours back into their artistic practice.
Miles Saraswat (he/him) is an artist based in Vancouver, Canada. His work explores themes of South-Asian spiritualism and the diaspora experience in Canada. Miles is committed to investigating how teachings from Hinduism can be relearned and acted upon through the diasporic lens, creating an understanding through his art impacted by his experience as a queer person. His work often works with imagery of the sun, bodies, environmental change, traditional South-Asian objects, and sunflowers.
