Lindsay Yee

Lindsay Yee is a graphic designer based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland who has produced work for a number of Asian-led creative organisations and initiatives, such as Proudly Asian Theatre, the Asian Aotearoa Arts Hui and the closing exhibition at Mercury Plaza.

Yee grew up in Ōtautahi Christchurch, where his parents ran a fish and chip shop in Hornby for part of his childhood (1984-1993). His family is Cantonese, “from the Guangdong province in China, specifically Taishan (台山) and Guangzhou (廣州), via Oamaru and Hong Kong (香港).” His great-grandfather and grandfather arrived in New Zealand during the 1920s and 1940s, respectively. His great-grandfather ran a laundry on Colombo Street in Christchurch, and he returned to China shortly before his death in the early 1940s. Yee’s grandfather was a market gardener in Oamaru who briefly lived in Hong Kong from 1959 to 1961, before moving to Christchurch in the 1970s.

Asked about his first encounter with design, Yee pointed to when he was asked to create a poster for the Halswell Primary School Country Carnival when he was a year 8 student there. He described “the thrill of seeing my work around the suburb”, on noticeboards at the library, the shops, the swimming pool, and the supermarket.

Yee studied design at Ara, and after graduating in 2008, worked at Fairfax Media. He relocated to Tāmaki Makaurau in 2010, where he began working with Jon Chapman-Smith at the design studio Fuman. Since 2014, Lindsay has worked independently through his own design practice, Category Design. His focus is on creative clients working in film, theatre, art, television and music — such as Candlelit Pictures, Proudly Asian Theatre, TVNZ, Basement Theatre, Script to Screen and Laneway Festival.

Yee designed the visual identity for the 2018 Asian Aotearoa Arts Hui and delivered a masterclass at Massey University as part of that year’s Hui programme. As part of the Hui, posters designed by Yee (which incorporated artworks by Kerry Ann Lee, Kim Lowe and Ant Sang) were featured around Pōneke Wellington for the duration of the month-long festival.

In 2019, when it was announced that Mercury Plaza, a beloved Asian food court and supermarket complex, was closing, Yee contributed to the exhibition that Jia Luo and Joni Lee curated to celebrate the complex, Mercury Plaza: Origins + New Beginnings, creating a hanging paper sculpture called 月兔 (Moon Rabbit) and designing the visual identity for the exhibition. After that show, Yee sold a limited run of a t-shirt designed to commemorate Mercury Plaza, with the profits donated to refugee resettlement.

Yee has said:

My work creating brand identities for organisations that represent Asian people meant researching connections to what represents people within the Asian diaspora, which really comes down to being categorised by external forces.

He explored this idea that our collective sense of “good design” is determined by the dominant culture in an installation created for the exhibition Toro Whakaara: Responses to Our Built Environment (2021), at Objectspace in Tāmaki Makaurau. The exhibition explored “the power and politics of place through the social interaction, occupation and movement it allows”, with each exhibiting practitioner exploring a particular site. Yee’s installation focused on fish and chip shops, inspired, in part, by his own family’s history. He said, “My work explores ideas around immigrants filling institutions of ‘Kiwiana’ – the goods and services being accepted, but the people not. The idea that the places they create, inhabit and the culture that they bring are included as part of the wider culture, but the people are not.”

Yee has also taught design at Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design.

2021 — Toro Whakaara: Responses To Our Built Environment, Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, group exhibition

2019 — Mercury Plaza: Origins + New Beginnings, Mercury Plaza, Tāmaki Makaurau, group exhibition