Dwelling Under Distant Suns
Kent Chan, Alvin Luong, Solveig Qu Suess
Curated by Yantong Li
Art Museum at the University of Toronto
September 4 – December 20, 2025
Future Tropics, 2023–24
Film still composite
Two-channel video
© Kent Chan. Image courtesy of the artist
Film still of Endowment, 2024
Video, 11:05 min
© Alvin Luong. Courtesy of the artist
Film still of Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains. Video, 2025
© Solveig Qu Suess. Courtesy of the artist
The Art Museum at the University of Toronto presents the exhibition Dwelling Under Distant Suns, curated by Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies graduate student Yantong Li, which addresses environmental precarity by highlighting the struggle to make visible the increasingly unpredictable landscape.
Works by Kent Chan, Alvin Luong, and Solveig Qu Suess
Dwelling Under Distant Suns grapples with the challenge of representing our planet’s growing climate crisis, especially environmental dangers that feel distant or out of sight. The artists in the exhibition turn to speculative storytelling and myth-making to bring a sense of immediacy to these realities, while interrogating the way we currently consume media about environmental precarity with a focus solely on the spectacular and dramatic, with little patience for things that require more time and attention.
“On a recent trip back home to Yunnan, I was struck by the fact that I could no longer see snow and ice on the peaks of the Cangshan Mountain, which has maintained frozen terrain for decades,” says Yantong Li. “An unstable climate has made the mountainous environment precarious, with native vegetation in gradual decline and water cycles becoming unpredictable. This sight was a direct visualization of climate-induced catastrophe — sensed only in longue durée — and I wanted to locate methodologies to represent these disparate sites across time and space. I included film-based works in this exhibition because representations of catastrophe across digital media have wreaked havoc on our attention span, rendering viewers as passive voyeurs. All the film works in the exhibition require lengthy sit-ins, denying immediate consumption but also extending an invitation to viewers to engage in a dialogue, with the only prerequisite being the willingness to sit with it.”
Cyanide Debt, 2025
Video still
© Alvin Luong. Courtesy of the artist
The exhibition features a new commissioned film by Alvin Luong, Cyanide Debt (2025), which restages and reimagines a mass cyanide poisoning in Bangkok as the artist creates a weak solution of cyanide using cassava, Thailand’s primary agricultural export.
Film still of Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains
Video, 2025
© Solveig Qu Suess. Courtesy of the artist
Film still of Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains
Video, 2025
© Solveig Qu Suess. Courtesy of the artist
Solveig Qu Suess also uses archival materials that complicate our understanding of historical events by meditating on the downstream politics of hydroelectric development affecting the Mekong River.
Film still of Future Tropics, 2023–24
Two-channel video
© Kent Chan. Image courtesy of the artist
Film still of Solar Orders, 2024
Two-channel video, 17’41
© Kent Chan
In Kent Chan’s work, the artist pushes observations of tropical expansion due to the climate crisis to extreme ends, arriving upon a fictional scenario of a future global tropic that blurs geographies, histories, and cultures.
ART MUSEUM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
7 Hart House Circle, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H3
