Queerborough Speaker Series: Anto Chan Artist Talk

Event Description

The Queerborough Archival Project aims to document the past, present, and futures of queer Scarborough, an eastern suburb in the city of Toronto. This speaker series is part of a larger research project that seeks to develop a digital archive of queer Scarborough, affirming that queer people have been – and continue to be – present in Scarborough despite the common notion that queerness only exists in the downtown core. With a lack of existing archival material and formal documentation, we are looking to use creative practice to generate new artifacts that document and affirm our community’s continued presence and resilience.

Funded by the Queer and Trans Research Lab at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, this speaker series seeks to both spotlight the works of local queer of colour artists and open up space for queer youth to gather, and creatively think through questions around space, memory, and queer futures/possibilities of Scarborough. Each invited artist will facilitate a series of two events – a virtual artist talk that contextualizes their artistic practice and how queerness + Scarborough informs their work, and a subsequent hands-on workshop where participants are invited to directly produce personal artistic works with guidance from the facilitator. We encourage those interested to attend both sessions of each artist.

Speaker Bio

Anto is a Queer Chinese-Canadian spoken word performance artist, facilitator, mentor, producer and writer. He performed his one-person show “Love So Far” at the Montreal Fringe Festival in 2019 and Guelph Fringe Festival 2024.  His poetry chapbook “Romantic Reflections” released in 2020, and just released his full-length album “InnerGenerational” in February 2025. He founded the Canada Council for the Arts funded project “InnerGenerational”, building a community that fosters a safe environment for Asian artists to evolve in their crafts without fear and limitations, deviating from the model minority archetype.

He practices Expressive Art Therapy, as his life work is centred on holding space for expansion, intersectionality, and self-love through the page, stage and community. He builds meaningful projects aiming to create and support art that speaks to the journey of soul healing, self-discovery and healing intergenerational trauma.