Weekly We Make: Exquisite Beasts

The collaborative drawings of Sylvia Ziemann and Yuji Szero Lee come from their experience working together in CARFAC Saskatchewan’s 2023-24 Foundational Mentorship Program. They used concepts from the surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse to come up with all sorts of different characters, creatures, and creations. Exquisite Corpse is a drawing game where several people work together to make strange and surprising creatures. In the game, each participant draws part of a creature on a piece of paper, leaving room for their collaborators to contribute. Then, they share their paper with their collaborators, and their collaborators contribute another part to the creature. Once everyone has added their part and the paper is unfolded, the group discovers the funny, weird, or wonderful creature they created together! Terrain Dance represents Sylvia and Yuji’s version of this game. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Unsettled Bodies Collective is the collaborative team of Yuji Szero Lee and Sylvia Ziemann, interdisciplinary artists living in Treaty 4 territory (Regina, SK). Often featuring chimerical characters, Yuji’s work primarily explores alternative ways of being and challenges gender conventions through personal, cultural, and reclaimed religious symbolism. Yuji is a diasporic Chinese (Cantonese) Canadian. Sylvia’s art practice addresses themes of shared anxiety in an uncertain world. Using animal-human hybrid characters, she crafts storied metaphoric worlds through painting, drawing, and sculpture. She is a mother, a Tarot card reader, and a second-generation German Canadian. Together, they blend their creative vision in a drawing methodology that tells stories of otherworldly creatures and realms through collaborative drawing.