Photo credit: Rebecca Tisdelle-Macias
BIO
Karen Tam 譚嘉文 is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist and curator whose research focuses on the constructions and imaginations of cultures and communities. In her installations, she recreates Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. Since 2000, she has exhibited her work and participated in residencies in North America, Europe, and China, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, He Xiangning Art Museum, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Deutsche Börse Residency at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the Toronto Biennial of Art. She has received grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts du Québec, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Tam’s exhibition, Swallowing Mountains, presented by the McCord Stewart Museum, received an Honourable Mention at the 2024 Canadian Museums Association Awards. She was the winner of the 2021 Giverny Capital Prize awarded by the Fondation Giverny pour l'art contemporain, a finalist for the 2017 Louis-Comtois Prize, a finalist for the 2016 Prix en art actuel from the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec, and long-listed for the 2010 and 2016 Sobey Art Awards.
Tam holds a MFA in Sculpture (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and a PhD in Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London). She is the Adjunct Curator at Griffin Art Projects, and is a contributor to the Asia Collections outside Asia: Questioning Artefacts, Cultures and Identities in the Museum (2020) publication edited by Iside Carbone and Helen Wang, to Alison Hulme (ed.) book, The Changing Landscape of China's Consumerism (2014) and to John Jung's book, Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurant (2010). Her work is in museum and corporate collections such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Global Affairs Canada (Embassy of Canada in London), Hydro-Québec Art Collection, La Caisse de dépôt du Québec, Collection of the Royal Bank of Canada, TD Group, Microsoft Art Collection, and in private collections in Canada, United States, and United Kingdom. She is represented by:Galerie
Hugues Charbonneau
CV// Download CV (updated January 2025) //
STATEMENT
Through my sculptures and installation work where I recreate spaces such as the Chinese restaurant, opium dens, Chinatown curio shops, early Chinese Canadian artist studios, and other sites of cultural encounters, I look at how the corporeal experience of space allows one to understand its history and community. In works such as Scent of Thunderbolts (2024) and With wings like clouds hung from the sky (2017-2020), I deconstructed and reconstructed different ‘ethnic spaces’ to see which elements signify meaning for the public and thus, play a role in influencing Western perceptions of the Chinese, or the Other. Using a cultural studies framework, I invite a critical view of contemporary chinoiserie, the impact of the Chinese export trade, and goods produced for the ‘Western’ taste. The fascination with the East dates back the days of the Silk Road, and even at the height of chinoiserie as the Western market was being flooded with Chinese products, Chinese people overseas were targeted by racist laws and deemed unassimilable aliens. I am questioning and playing off notions of authenticity and the copy by producing my own fake antiques. These are based on the East Asian and chinoiserie objects in various museums, local collections, and eBay, using everyday materials and methods (seemingly genuine jade ornaments are sculpted out of soap, porcelain is fashioned out of papier-mâché, and silver objects created out of aluminium trays, etc.). This hopefully highlights the encounters that occur between specific locales and East Asian-influenced material culture and refer not only to mass production of pirated consumer goods in China but also to the questions that are always present where artistic production is concerned.
A deep engagement with archival and collections research has also led me to question whose histories get to be collected and told, and to interrogate the narratives that have been constructed around the Chinese diaspora. How do we remember, represent, support, and simultaneously deny the erasures of our stories, spaces, and community? If there are minimal traces of the existence of an individual or organization, what are ways that this life can be made visible again? By actively bringing to light overlooked aspects of Chinese Canadian communities and culture through my artwork, my intent is to create counterpoints to accepted canons, official histories, public archives and collections.
(January 2025)
The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
