Celebrating Faye Leung’s bold spirit and community legacy.
An art installation by Yukon artist, Leslie Leong.
Opening Reception: November 15th 2025, from 2 pm to 5 pm
Canton-sardine Gallery, #071 (lower level), 268 Keefer St., Vancouver, BC
On Exhibition until Dec. 27th 2025, Open Wednesday thru Saturday 12 – 6 pm
Co-curated by:
Dr. Melissa Karmen Lee, CEO, Chinese Canadian Museum, Vancouver, BC
Steven Dragonn, Director/Curator, Canton-sardine, Vancouver BC
Curatorial Statement
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 the Saturday morning 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.
Leslie Leong Arts 