Vancouver’s renowned “hat lady” will be commemorated in a new exhibition at a Chinatown art gallery. Madame Maverick: Celebrating the bold spirit and community legacy of Faye Leung will be on display at Canton-sardine (071-268 Keefer Street) from November 15 to December 27. The Victoria-born Leung died last year at the age of 92 after a flamboyant business career in Vancouver.
The exhibition is the brainchild of Leung’s niece, Leslie Leong, a multidisciplinary artist in Whitehorse. Co-curated by Melissa Karmen Lee and Steven Dragonn, Madame Maverick transforms a family archive into a contemporary installation.
In the curatorial statement, Lee points out that the artist “envisions Faye’s hats as a whirling vortex that registers Leung’s charismatic and often disruptive social force”.
“At once intimate and bold, Madame Maverick reflects on the dual legacies of Faye Leung: as a trailblazing Chinese Canadian businesswoman who reshaped Vancouver’s social and political fabric, and as a woman who refused to mute her individuality in the face of racism, sexism, and exclusion,” Lee notes in the statement. “Her story reminds us that personal style can be a form of strategy, a way to claim space, negotiate power, and spark change.”
In the statement, Leong compares her aunt to the Tasmanian Devil of the Looney Tunes cartoons.
“Energetic, colourful, and cheeky, she was no angel—yet wherever she went, she affected those around her,” Leong declares.
Faye Leung and the Zalm
This was evident when Leung negotiated the sale of former premier Bill Vander Zalm’s Richmond amusement park in 1990. A subsequent inquiry determined that Vander Zalm was in a conflict of interest when he mixed his public duties with his private interest in the sale of Fantasy Gardens to Taiwanese businessman Tan Yu, who was seeking a provincial trust company licence. That prompted the Zalm’s resignation and the subsequent election of an NDP government.
Leung disclosed that Tan gave the former premier US$20,000 in $100 bills. The commissioner of the inquiry, Ted Hughes, rejected Leung’s explanation that Vander Zalm was holding onto the cash for “safe keeping”. For years afterward, Leung alleged that Vander Zalm never paid her a commission for negotiating the deal.
Over the years, Leung appeared at countless public events and community dinners. Once, she showed up at a Vancouver International Comedy Fest launch, where she met the comedy duo Local Anxiety (Mark Leiren-Young and Kevin Crofton).
“She wanted to join Local Anxiety. On stage,” Leiren-Young recalled in his obituary for her on Substack. “Leung sang a song I wrote for her to the tune of I Shot the Sheriff. Her gleeful, high-pitched, playfulness earned us national media coverage for: I Fought the Premier.”
Learn more about the Madame Maverick exhibition on the Canton-sardine website. Follow Pancouver on X @PancouverMedia and Bluesky @pancouver.bsky.social. The publication is also on Instagram @PancouverMedia.
