Sell Out, A Series: 5 Questions with Nancy Lee
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Sell Out is a series by interdisciplinary artist Angela Fama (she/they), who co-creates conversations with individual artists across Vancouver. Questioning ideas of artistry, identity, “day jobs,” and how they intertwine, Fama settles in with each artist (at a local café of their choice) and asks the same series of questions. With one roll of medium format film, Fama captures portraits of the artist after their conversations.
Nancy Lee (she/they) is a Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Follow them on Instagram @whichnancy or visit their website at https://www.nancylee.ca.
Location: Propaganda Coffee
What do you make/create?
I make a bunch of different things – media art, interactive installations, XR environments, and events that come in many forms (music festivals, workshops, panels, and movie nights). I’m not really bound by medium. I also make films, music videos, DJ sets, live performances – all sorts of things!
I think the most important part of the things I make is a connection; some kind of connection that connects with people in a deeper way, but also to create space for people to connect with each other in that authentic way.
What do you do to support that?
Making art and living is a very complicated process. There are a lot of hoops to jump through. I maybe only spend like fifteen, or twenty percent, of my time actually being creative and making things; the rest of it is producing, figuring out how to make the space to make the thing, figuring out how to make the space for someone like myself to make the thing.
A big part of my practice is also working in an advocacy realm. I work as a grant coach and a consultant with some funders. I provide support in terms of the design of their programs, and in turn, I get paid to do all of that stuff.
I run a studio space in Chinatown. I also live in my studio space in Chinatown. We do events and rentals there, so there’s revenue generating potential that helps subsidize the rent for the space. I share it with another artist.
I pick up odd gigs here and there – performance projects, other consulting gigs. In recent years, I’ve been doing a lot more consulting and speaking. I spend a lot of time producing and writing for funding. That’s actually what I spend a lot of my time doing. The process of producing and trying to fundraise requires a lot of communication and relationship building.
Because of all the work that I do, I also work with a lot of younger artists, curators, and cultural producers in a mentorship capacity, so they can have the resources to do things maybe differently than when I was doing things in my time. You learn, and you grow, and a big part of it is passing that information and knowledge on, kind of an intergenerational knowledge transfer. I’ve been someone who has benefited from that. I’ve definitely had a lot of mentors. I never went to art school, formally, but I’ve had mentors throughout my life that have supported me and pushed me into a direction that I could thrive in.
A big part of my practice is beyond the making of things. As an artist, sometimes that’s such a small part; everybody sees the things that you make, but that’s just the means to the ends, which is a certain kind of lifestyle philosophy that you want to live by. Sure, performing, getting a show, doing the things that get the most press, all of that stuff… that’s not the end. That’s the means to make it so that you are able to sustain the creative process, or the relationships that you have in your life. In a way, I make art to support what I really want to do, which is having these kinds of meaningful relationships – with my collaborators, friends, teachers, mentees, people that use my space, that have interesting ideas that I like to engage in, ideas about the future.
I’m really interested in futurities and world building – world building not in just the fictional way. I love fictional world building too, like science fiction and things like that, but I’m also just interested in world building as a curatorial practice, as a way to live, to imagine the future. That’s all we really have: our imagination for a better future, because life in the present moment is very hard.
Describe something about how your art practice and your “day job” interact.
There is no boundary. I literally live in my studio. It’s not very glamorous; there’s no heating, it’s cold. It’s really old, the building. It’s not necessarily cozy, but it allows me to live in a certain way. Yeah, I don’t really have a separation between that.
What’s a challenge you’re facing, or have faced, in relation to this and/or what’s a benefit?
The benefit is to have access to a space – which is really rare in Vancouver – a space that I can also offer to other people. I can hustle funding to support the space in order to offer space and residency opportunities for other people. That’s been really good. I often use that as an opportunity for me to deepen relationships with certain individuals and artists that I’m interested in, want to get to know better, and to be able to put on impromptu shows with. To be able to say, “Ok, this artist is in town. I want to do an artist talk,” or when there’s an idea, and to be able to make it a thing, to be able to have the space to realize it, is amazing.
The con is, because there’s a lack of boundary, my life kind of gets absorbed into a lot of the activities that happen in my space. There are amazing things that happen there, like dance workshops, music events, film screenings, and things like that, but I sometimes get really involved in all of it. Not having a separation, I sometimes just get tired. Managing the space is a lot of work. There’s a lot of people, feelings, obligations, and responsibilities that come with holding space and managing a physical space; and cleaning, or the not so fun things like increase in rent from increasing commercial property taxes. You start having to engage in discourse in current municipal policy around things like that and certain political platforms. It takes a lot of labour.
At this point in my life, I’m still enjoying doing it. I’ve had mentors that have run spaces, lived in spaces, things like that, and I know there is an end date to that. You do burn out after a while. I’m not precious about it, everything has to have endings. Life has to have endings, so I am open to all that as well; enjoying it for what it is, in the moment, and not thinking too much about it, but also knowing it’s fleeting.
Have you made, or created, anything that was inspired by something from your day job? Please describe.
I have a piece currently in development about labour. It should be out next year. I have already performed a smaller edition of it five times in 2022. That piece is called OSMOSi: 422 Unprocessable Entity. The first edition of it was a thirteen-minute performance. It’s got four-channel sound, it’s my first time attempting an electro-acoustic composition with one of my mentors, Aleksandar Zecevic.
Essentially, the story is, I’m a subroutine inside an application that does the same task over and over again. I’m inside an Uber App and gaining some kind of awareness, or consciousness, because there’s something calling me to wake up inside this application. I’m realizing that because there’s all these things that are happening, maybe the subroutine isn’t entirely conscious of it, but I’m realising the app is shutting down, and that, as a subroutine, I need to ask the user for permission to access the internet in order for me to escape to an open-source application online.
With all this happening, you hear sounds of stock market related things; there’s the Dow Jones – I mean, the real-world stock market has been down quite a bit – so you hear things like samples of that. The stock market is crashing, and it’s no longer profitable to run an application like Uber, and that’s why they’re shutting it down. These working submachines are out of work, and they need to find another place in order for them to live. They have to beg permission to travel across the internet to go to a different application.
It's a project addressing the precarity of the platform economy. During the pandemic, that was one of the things that was really on my mind: how precarious contract work is, especially with artists, artists that perform, or have weekly events at nightclubs. They’re not protected, even though they’ve been doing something consistently, for many years. There’s still a lot of barriers in terms of even accessing CERB itself – how you’ve been previously reporting on your taxes, or what kind of knowledge you have with that, really limits your ability to access the government’s services or wage support systems. There has been a lot of union organizing in the last two years, especially with platform services; there have been new bills that have been introduced in Ontario; there have been movements that have been happening in BC as well.
OSMOSi: 422 Unprocessable Entity was directly related to my own situation, to the situation of people around me that were struggling to figure things out. It felt like the right time to make a piece about that, because I think there’s a diasporic genre of work that is coming out of the Canadian arts sphere. I’ve definitely made work that speaks on diasporic identity, and I wanted to make a different type of work. I wanted to explore fiction and work about labour. It can speak to a wider audience in some way; there are more people that can relate to it. That’s something we can all connect too.
Angela Fama (she/they) is an artist, Death Conversation Game entrepreneur, photographer, musician, previous small-business server of many years (The Templeton, Slickity Jim’s etc.). They are a mixed European 2nd-generation settler currently working on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations.
Follow them at IG @angelafama IG @deathconversationgame or on their website www.angelafama.com
