Abstract This article reflects on the differing articulations of care in the wake of the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings. On March 16, 2021, at 5 pm in the afternoon, a white gunman killed eight women, six of them Asian Americans, at three spa and massage businesses in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. With attention to the material and discursive forms following the shootings, the article considers how particular forms of visibility are conferred upon “Asian women” in relation to the question of anti-Asian violence. It then focuses how care and protection is defined by the law to trace how the case of the Atlanta Spa Shootings becomes a renewed site of Asian American attachment to hate crime legislation. As a response to this problematic, it explores the Vancouver-based trans femme nonbinary drag artist, Kendell Yan, aka Maiden China, and her memorialization of the Atlanta Spa Shootings, arguing how a queer performance of care can expand and rearticulate contemporary meanings of anti-Asian violence.

Abstract This article examines interventions by Asian Canadian artists Derya Akay, Cindy Mochizuki, and Alize Zorlutana in the exhibitions Fugitive Rituals (2021) and Artwork Becomes Dinner Party (2023) at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. These exhibitions undermined the colonial underpinnings of the university museum and nourished community and collectivity but also revealed deep disparities in the institution. They underscored how democratic outcomes are rarely untroubled by buried museal histories. Structural change currently underway at the museum presents a critical opportunity to imagine new possibilities. Diasporic collections like the Migratory Collection, which point to the museum’s colonial legacies, require the care and knowledge of diasporic artists to make their place at the museum meaningful. There is also an urgent need for Queen’s University to recognize the colonial legacy of Agnes’s Migratory Collection and to fund appropriate museum experts, in permanent positions, to undertake the decolonial work necessary to facilitate lasting change.