A sewing machine covered in stickers is perched on the edge of the work table of textile artist Justin Ming Yong’s home studio in Toronto. On top of a soft heap of works in progress, there are two fabric grids emblazoned with a design resembling abstracted flames. On the walls, a piece of patchwork rolled over with white paint hangs alongside a pink skateboard deck bearing an image of actress Chloë Sevigny’s high-school yearbook photo and the words “Fucking Awesome.”

These are not your grandmother’s quilts. Put any images of prim and precise calico squares arranged in neat rows out of your mind. Yong, a self-taught textile artist, often plays with subverting the traditions of the medium. Over the past four years, he has emerged as one of the most exciting new faces in fibre arts, receiving invitations to show his intricate, colourful quilts at museums and galleries across Ontario, including the Art Gallery of Guelph and Cambridge Art Galleries, and even farther afield at The National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky.

It all started with a visit to an antique shop, where Yong picked up a copy of America’s Glorious Quilts and felt inspired by the medium’s rich history and tactility. Before this, he had been working in commercial photography for a decade, and while he enjoyed making art with analog cameras, overall he felt he had reached his limit making art through a lens. “There’s been this movement of people appreciating handmade things, slower-process things,” Yong says, lamenting that “in the world we are living in now, everything is so immediate.”

The nature of Yong’s work means that “you have to commit to where you’re going—you can’t go back,” he says. Espousing this ideology are two works in progress affixed to a wall in his studio, which he began while attending the Córtex Frontal artist residency in Arraiolos, Portugal, earlier this year. Starting with a “gridded-out approach” that was very “controlled and exact,” Yong used evenly spaced loops of yarn to tie layers of fabric together. Then he went wild with bleach and india ink, creating a negative exposure of how the quilt ties flailed recklessly during the process.

While he usually hangs his finished works, Yong will stretch these quilts like canvases. Not quite recognizable as quilts any longer but still bearing traces of the medium, each of these works is an expressionistic outburst reminiscent of a Cy Twombly painting, crackling with an indecipherable calligraphic script that spells out its maker’s own rules.

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