Madame Maverick : Celebrating the bold spirit and community legacy of Faye Leung
Artist: Leslie Leong
Curated by Dr. Melissa Karmen Lee & Steven Dragonn
Duration: November 15 – December 27, 2025
Opening reception: November 15th, Saturday, 2-5pm
Venue: Canton-sardine, 071-268 Keefer st, Vancouver
Gallery hours: Weds-Sats 12-6pm
Madame Maverick celebrates the life and legacy of Faye Leung (1932–2024), Vancouver’s legendary “Hat Lady,” a fearless entrepreneur and community force, a singular figure in Vancouver’s Chinese Canadian community whose sartorial flamboyance was inseparable from her strategies of self-determination and public presence. Leung disrupted both gendered and racialized expectations of business decorum by appearing in sequined gowns and elaborate hats while negotiating high-stakes real estate and commercial ventures. In doing so, the exhibition contributes to broader conversations about how personal aesthetics can operate as a mode of resistance, cultural continuity, and political visibility within minoritized communities.
Through this exhibition, Yukon-based artist Leslie Leong, Faye’s niece, mobilizes the family archive as artistic material, translating the affective charge of personal memory into contemporary installation. Her central work envisions Faye’s hats as a whirling vortex that registers Leung’s charismatic and often disruptive social force. As Leong reflects: “Energetic, colourful, and cheeky, she was no angel – yet wherever she went, she affected those around her. Like the Tasmanian Devil (of Looney Tunes), she left a swirl of activity in her wake.”
Presented in the heart of Chinatown, this exhibition invites visitors to consider how visibility, self-expression, and community influence intersect, and to honour those, like Faye, who forged new paths by daring to stand out. At once intimate and bold, Madame Maverick reflects on the dual legacies of Faye Leung: as a trailblazing Chinese Canadian businesswoman who reshaped Vancouver’s social and political fabric, and as a woman who refused to mute her individuality in the face of racism, sexism, and exclusion. Her story reminds us that personal style can be a form of strategy, a way to claim space, negotiate power, and spark change.
Presented within the intimate context of the gallery in Chinatown’s Canton-sardine, the project proposes an expanded reading of fashion and self-presentation as forms of cultural production and historiography, positioning Leung’s legacy alongside contemporary strategies of identity formation and feminist agency in diasporic art practices.
About the artist
Leslie Leong is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Whitehorse, Yukon, whose practice is rooted in sustainability, material reuse, and environmental awareness. Beginning over 40 years ago in photography and ceramics, her work has evolved into an exploratory approach that embraces unconventional materials and experimental processes. Driven by curiosity and a restless creative instinct, Leong frequently adopts non-traditional techniques, allowing intuition, improvisation, and discovery to guide her practice.
Her current body of work reflects on ecological futures and the accelerating integration of technology into human life—from artificial intelligence and wearable tech to implants and augmented bodies. While technological advancements promise efficiency and heightened capability, Leong questions humanity’s capacity to cope with rapid change and the culture of excess it fuels. In response, she engages in a tactile, regenerative practice, sourcing materials from recycling depots and landfill sites to transform discarded objects into thoughtful artworks that reimagine value, function, and sustainability.
Faye Leung as a Teenager on a Horse
A nostalgic black and white photo of a young Faye Leung enjoying a ride on a horse.
Courtesy of Professor Imogene Lim
About the Curators
Dr. Melissa Karmen Lee (李林嘉敏) is a Canadian curator and cultural leader whose work centers on social practice art, public history, and diasporic visual culture. She is the curator of Dream Factory: Cantopop, Mandopop, 1980s–2000, a landmark exhibition examining the sonic and visual worlds of Asian popular music through the lens of the Chinese Canadian diaspora. Lee currently serves as Chief Executive Officer of the Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver, where she oversaw the successful opening of its permanent home in July 2023. Under her leadership, the museum has presented seven exhibitions—including three major inaugural shows—and earned both the National Trust for Canada Award and the Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Museums in its first year.
A social practice curator committed to bridging artists, archives, and communities, Lee has worked internationally across contemporary art and cultural institutions. In 2023, she curated Rirkrit Tiravanija: Jouez / Play at the PHI Foundation in Montreal. She was part of the founding team at Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts in Hong Kong, where she launched the Summer Institute, and later served as Director of Education and Public Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery, developing the acclaimed online series Art Connects. She previously taught in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and holds degrees from McGill University, the University of Canterbury, and Lancaster University.
Steven Dragonn is a Vancouver based visual artist and curator. His artistic practice is beyond Conceptualist and Neo Hyper-real Pictorialist across Communicatics and personal visual experience, while several specific interests of Curatorial, such like individual experience, immigration of minorities, identities, social political sufferance appeared in his project. His practice involves wide range of forms, including photography, video, sculpture and new media art such as immersive installation, video installation, image-sculpture and digital art.
He currently works as an Independent Curator and Multimedia Artist in both Vancouver, Canada and Guangzhou, China. He is the founder of Canton-sardine, an artist and curator driven contemporary art space established in 2018 in Vancouver, Canada, which has widely showcased national and international acclaimed artists/collectives. Dragonn became a Canadian citizen in 2021. Since then, he is award winning curator and grants recipient from Canada Council for the Arts & BC Arts Council.
CANTON-SARDINE 