Art Metropole

#16922

Lingering Archives: Effervescence

Artists

Lingxiang Wu and JeeMin Kim

Writer

Sheung-King

Price

$20.00

Date

2026

Publisher

Self-published

Format

Artists' Books

Size

10.5 × 16 × 0.5 cm

Length

90 pp

Genre

Creative Writing , Asian Art & Artists, Literary, Queer Art & Artists

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.

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.