Revealing the Structural: Censorship and Discrimination brings together art, lived experience, and collective resistance to examine the systemic forces that shape censorship and discrimination within public institutions. Rooted in feminist advocacy and contemporary visual practice, the exhibition foregrounds the work of Yafang Shi, whose interdisciplinary approach transforms personal and institutional records into powerful acts of testimony.
Drawing inspiration from Chinese Yuan dynasty painter Huang Gongwang’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, Shi reimagines the traditional handscroll as a contemporary form of storytelling and resistance. Through expansive photographic collages and layered texts, her work traces lived experiences alongside the shared struggles of marginalized artists navigating opaque systems of power. The scroll format invites viewers to move through the work physically and conceptually, mirroring the unfolding nature of memory, inquiry, and justice.
As a journalist-turned artist, Shi integrates documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests related to her human rights case against the Aurora Public Library and the Town of Aurora. These materials are presented not only as evidence, but as visual and conceptual elements that expose the structures governing institutional decision-making. The exhibition is further shaped through collaboration with EMILIA-AMALIA and Chinese Feminism Toronto, whose contributions underscore the importance of collective action, feminist solidarity, and community-based advocacy. Black box installations created by Chinese Feminism Toronto symbolize the opacity and resistance artists encounter when confronting censorship, while EMILIA-AMALIA’s compiled documentation from Open Hearing: Dreaming in Dark Times expands the exhibition into a shared space of dialogue and imagining.
Together, these works form a layered visual language that speaks to censorship not as an isolated act, but as a structural condition: one that demands both visibility and collective response.
Yafang Shi is a Chinese settler, feminist, journalist-turned-artist, and poet whose practice explores gender, race, class, censorship, body, identity, and environmental issues through a decolonial, intersectional, and transnational feminist lens. Her work spans long-term documentary projects on social movements for women’s rights and social justice, poetic and emotionally driven creative works, and socially engaged, collaborative public installations.
Beginning in 2017, Shi has developed an ongoing documentary practice focused on feminist and social justice movements, alongside evocative visual and textual works that reflect inner emotional landscapes and collective sociopolitical realities. Her artistic approach bridges investigative journalism and visual storytelling, using archival material, institutional records, and personal narrative to challenge systems of exclusion and silencing.
Shi’s work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions across art galleries, museums, universities, public libraries, community spaces, and outdoor public sites, including exhibitions at the Contact Photography Festival. Her solo exhibitions have been hosted by the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto and the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She has also participated in the #MeToo in China exhibition, where she delivered a public talk titled Body, Feminist Art, Censorship, and Activism. Through both her artistic and advocacy practices, Shi continues to champion artists’ rights to freedom of expression and human rights.
EMILIA-AMALIA is an intersectional, intergenerational feminist experimental working group whose practice centres collective inquiry and dialogue. Learn more at www.emilia-amalia.com.
Chinese Feminism Toronto is a grassroots collective engaged in feminist advocacy, transnational activism, and community-based organizing in relation to Sinophone and East Asian feminist and queer movements. Follow their work on Instagram at @cnfeminismto.
