Joshua Lue Chee Kong (b. 1988) is an interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and researcher from Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, currently based in Toronto, Canada. His practice investigates Caribbean histories of creolization, migration, and material culture, examining how layered colonial, diasporic, and vernacular narratives shape identity, memory, and the social fabric of the Caribbean region and its global extensions.
Working across ceramics, sculpture, photography, digital media, and archival methodologies, Kong engages processes of casting, imprinting, and preservation as conceptual tools. His work frequently explores the body as an archive, materializing memory through clay, bronze, resin, and digitally mediated forms and interrogates systems of extraction, trade, and cultural transmission across the Atlantic world. Recent bodies of work expand his interest in speculative archives, reliquary forms, and food memory as vessels of inherited knowledge and diasporic survival.
Kong received his BFA in Graphic Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design and his MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design from OCAD University. He has participated in artist residencies at Red Gate Gallery, Beijing (2015), and Vermont Studio Center, Vermont (2017). At Medulla Art Gallery, Trinidad, he presented two solo exhibitions, Moulded Memories (2014) and Paradise (2016).
His work has been published in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, ANNO, See Me Here: A Survey of Contemporary Self-Portraits from the Caribbean, and The Draconion Switch e-magazine. In 2012, two of his photographic works appeared on the cover of TIME magazine (August issue). Alongside his studio practice, Kong is actively engaged in community-based research, mentorship, and collaborative projects that foreground collective memory-making and alternative archival practices within diasporic communities.
Photography by May Truong for Scent of Thunderbolts by Karen Tam.