Jiā yóu!: PROCEED WITH CAUTION | Hamilton Artists Inc.

A neon orange tarp that has prints in each corner in shades of yellow, green and blue. There is a blue, rounded symbol in the middle.

Kev Liang

Sep 4 - Nov 7, 2026 / Cannon Gallery

Working with synthetic tarps—objects that are normally temporary, utilitarian, and disregarded— Jiā yóu!: PROCEED WITH CAUTION explores how mediated environments shape relationships, relevance, and shared encounters. A tarp shelters, protects, divides, and conceals; it creates improvised architecture that marks belonging while signalling precarity. Translated through processes of digital and print media, the tarp becomes a record of lived tension and a gesture toward the fragility yet resilience of immigrant survival structures, cultural distance, and queer discourse within a settler-colonial space. The tarp is a social material: one that constructs worlds by holding together what might otherwise fall apart.

A photo of Kev Liang, who is a Chinese-Canadian man with short, dark hair, dark eyes and a moustache. He is wearing a navy blue coat over a brown button-down top, and has tattoos on his chest. Behind him is one of his tarp artworks.

Kev Liang is an emerging multidisciplinary artist originally from rural central Alberta. He is currently based in Edmonton, on Treaty 6 territory and has a BFA in Printmaking and Intermedia with Distinction from the University of Alberta. Kev has exhibited at SNAP Gallery, Latitude 53, Art Museum at the University of Toronto for the 2021 BMO 1st! Art award, The New Gallery, Neutral Ground, among others. Using lens-based processes, layered print-media, and synthetic materiality, Kev aims to dissect his homo/queer, diasporic 2nd-gen Chinese Canadian identity and his existential anxieties surrounding lineage and prosperity within the Anthropocene and so-called “oil country.” His work grapples with traditional Chinese cultural and philosophical expectations around the continuation of blood lineage and his inability, as a queer body, to fulfill those expectations.