A picture of Tam’s great-grandfather taken in San Francisco, which the artist discovered in a family photo album years ago, is an impetus for this new series of works. In the photograph, Tam’s great-grandfather sits on an accent chair, all suited up and with a slight smile on his face. Behind him, faint projections of floral and architectural patterns appear on a background screen. He looks like a successful businessman. But did he actually “make it” in the “Gold Mountain”?¹ Was he presented as who he really was, or was it all orchestrated by the photographer? Tam’s great-grandfather, whose last name was Wong, had migrated to San Francisco in the early 20th century, and he sent this photograph to his family in Toisan (Taishan), China, along with letters reporting about his life in the United States. But little information about him has been passed down the family line. At that time, to Chinese immigrants, sending a photo of oneself enclosed in letters to their families in China was a way of sending comfort and conveying homesickness. Today, we are one text away from each other and we can be connected in an instant, but the practice of writing and sending letters with updates on one’s well-being was once a system of support and care. Additionally, it was a way to prove the sitter’s existence. Those who had to leave their partners, children and parents behind to seek a better life in the West and to make money to support them risked being forgotten, or worse, erased. The act of having a professional portrait taken, posing with a few choice items that signalled success, was a way to make a particular statement: I am here.

A picture of Tam’s great-grandfather taken in San Francisco, which the artist discovered in a family photo album years ago, is an impetus for this new series of works. In the photograph, Tam’s great-grandfather sits on an accent chair, all suited up and with a slight smile on his face. Behind him, faint projections of floral and architectural patterns appear on a background screen. He looks like a successful businessman. But did he actually “make it” in the “Gold Mountain”?¹ Was he presented as who he really was, or was it all orchestrated by the photographer? Tam’s great-grandfather, whose last name was Wong, had migrated to San Francisco in the early 20th century, and he sent this photograph to his family in Toisan (Taishan), China, along with letters reporting about his life in the United States. But little information about him has been passed down the family line. At that time, to Chinese immigrants, sending a photo of oneself enclosed in letters to their families in China was a way of sending comfort and conveying homesickness. Today, we are one text away from each other and we can be connected in an instant, but the practice of writing and sending letters with updates on one’s well-being was once a system of support and care. Additionally, it was a way to prove the sitter’s existence. Those who had to leave their partners, children and parents behind to seek a better life in the West and to make money to support them risked being forgotten, or worse, erased. The act of having a professional portrait taken, posing with a few choice items that signalled success, was a way to make a particular statement: I am here.

Taken in the 1940s, the photograph of Tam’s great-grandfather is also a thread that connects to the artist’s ongoing observations and research on early Chinese Canadian visual culture and cultural habits. The title of the exhibition came out of Tam’s research at the Kelowna Public Archives where she read letters and correspondences between Chinese immigrants of Toishanese (Taishanese) descent in British Columbia and their families. In one of these letters, a woman expressed her longing and increasing loneliness to her husband, who was in Canada earning a living, by using the blooming of chrysanthemums as a metaphor for the passing of time. “The chrysanthemum has opened twelve times,” the wife wrote. Chrysanthemums open only once a year, so as the wife reminded, twelve years had passed since they separated. Poetic and sentimental, this sentence elicits a field of emotions deeply particular to diasporic communities, negotiated by distance, time and the notion of homeland.

Dispersed throughout the gallery space, Tam’s immersive installations clearly reference the backdrops seen in portrait studios. These studios often composed temporary, adjustable and sometimes makeshift settings as photograph backgrounds. For this exhibition, Tam reimagined and designed various backdrops and decors based on the photographs that emerged from her archive visits, using such trinkets and furniture as decorated vases, fake bonsai, golden clocks, rosewood chairs and patterned area rugs. Mixing these objects with sound, lighting, historical documents and records, Tam also created these mise-en-scènes as an open-ended approach—referencing styles and aesthetics of portrait studios in San Francisco, Vancouver, Montréal and Toronto that Chinese bodies once occupied, in order to reimagine their lives. 

the chrysanthemum has opened twelve times reveals how cultural elements or symbols are visual cues responsible for and capable of constructing a setting associated with a particular culture. In Tam’s practice, her interest in and commentary on chinoiserie² play an important role in her interventive space-making. Chinoiserie maintains the colonial and racial order by exoticizing and appropriating Chinese cultural forms. But what does “Chinese” mean anyway? Tam has a growing collection of objects—acquired, borrowed, or created by her—that she reuses from installation to installation. They form a bank of visual data identified as “Chinese,” from which Tam can draw resources for different projects. At the Koffler, the photo studio installations are embedded with multiple fake antiques made of papier mâché, ink and gouache. They are a vehicle for Tam to joke about misrepresented Chinese cultural identity and contest the idea of “Chineseness.” For example, in Fantastic Beasts (2019), a decorative vase made of papier-mâché, gouache and pigmented India ink integrated into the reimagined installation of Yucho Chow Studio from Vancouver, a foo dog (Chinese guardian lion) is shown eating an Oreo cookie. With a sense of humour, Tam disrupts an established, coded system of racial attitudes toward an understanding of what “Chinese” means. She delicately rejects the contemporary pursuit of authenticity by proactively turning the tables on viewers. 

One might assume that Photoshop or cell phone photo applications have undercut and made redundant the need for studio portraits with physical settings. Tam calls that idea in question. To her, objects can act as memory devices or evoke the presence of the absent body. The absence of physical bodies in the chrysanthemum has opened twelve times contributes to an empty façade of these constructions, while the overall exhibition experience becomes their interior—as a series of bodily encounters. Further, it generates two questions: Who was photographing? And who was being photographed? At the gallery entrance, viewers are greeted by a large vintage camera that Tam’s father owns, facing the portrait of her great-grandfather on the opposite wall. These elements are signifiers that initiate a dialogue about the self-representation of Chinese bodies. Activated by family photographs that Tam accessed from various sources and former photo studio owners—including the May’s Studio in San Francisco, the Chinese Canadian Archive at the Toronto Public Library, and Tenfay Lee Photo in Montréal—the gallery space is filled with representation of the said absence. The result is that these sourced materials then turn into a collection of collective experiences and memories missing in official narratives and records. “I hoped I could contribute to the archives in my own way” by incorporating them into the project, said Tam in a recent talk.³ Placing the tension between visibility and omission at the centre of the Koffler installation, Tam built a number of layers of access for different kinds of viewers: one for the general public, to acquaint them with the subject matter; one for the Chinese Canadian community, to relate to this kind of photographic practice; and one for the family of the photographed to honour their lineage and familial memories.

Adding to the sensory depth of the exhibition is the inclusion of sounds of Cantonese opera and Mookyu (also Muyu, meaning “wooden fish”), excerpted from a set of 78 RPM vinyl records of Cantonese opera from the 1940s and a series of Mookyu tunes performed in the 2000s by a Chinese elder from Montréal. Considered a major genre of Chinese theatrical productions, Cantonese opera has been recognized as a cultural tradition and art form since at least the late 19th century. Mookyu also dates from the 19th century and is sung in Toisanese. In the North American context, it is usually based on the immigration experience and personal stories.⁴ The first part of the 20th century saw continuous waves of Chinese immigration to North America from Cantonese regions (primarily the province of Guangdong and Hong Kong). Among the immigrants at the time, Cantonese opera was a dominant cultural expression in social life and one of the most popular forms of entertainment. But it faced two notable setbacks during the last two centuries: it was rendered as “marginal and inadmissible” in the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act of the United States (1882–1943); and it was overshadowed by Beijing opera in the 1930s, which was recognized as a more fitting representative of Chinese theatre.⁵ More recently, with Mandarin propagated as the People’s Republic of China’s official language and the recent influx of immigrants from non-Cantonese areas, Cantonese opera and other dialect-based singing styles have received reduced attention and resources for preservation and revitalization in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Therefore, places such as San Francisco and Vancouver have become especially precious sites for preserving the North American Chinese variations of these cultural traditions. Reflecting on Cantonese opera performers’ portraits that Tam found at May’s Studio in San Francisco, she borrows Cantonese opera and Mookyu as conduits to channel a sense of belonging and bring forward the cultural significance that these traditions carry. Beyond nostalgia, Tam’s subtle acts of resistance and emancipation of these resilient art forms point to the continued presence of Cantonese opera and its related vernacular expressions in North America. 

In this era of selfies and Instagram, Tam’s installations must appear incredibly engaging and even playful to many people at first glance. While the settings she emulates were originally made to be occupied, her iterations do not invite participation (in this case, gallery signage reads, “Please do not walk on the carpets in the exhibition”). Rather, they invite you to observe, listen and keep a distance; to not take space that is not reserved for you. Perhaps these installations are stand-ins for the silenced—those who were and are misunderstood; those who deserve a voice and our respect. Maybe in the chrysanthemum has opened twelve times, they finally all made it in the “Gold Mountain.” They finally belong.

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¹ Gold Mountain (金山) pronounced as “Gum San” in Cantonese, is a commonly used nickname for San Francisco, California, and historically used broadly by Chinese people to refer to western regions of North America, including British Columbia, Canada. After gold was found in the Sierra Nevada in 1848, thousands of Chinese travellers from Taishan (Toisan), Guangdong, came to the West in search of riches during the California Gold Rush. And after gold was discovered in the lower Fraser Valley in 1857, large numbers of Chinese people from San Francisco, and directly from China, came seeking wealth both from digging gold and creating businesses. Even when the prosperous period of the gold rush ended in the 1860s and British Columbia faced adverse economic conditions, Chinese people continued to migrate to “Gum San.” 

² The word “Chinoiserie” (中國風) generally refers to a collection of objects, or a taste for decoration, created in the Western idea of Chinese style and closely tied to wider fantasies of “the Orient.” Academic Diana Yeh notes that, recently, the term has extended beyond the decorative arts “to highlight the continuing aesthetic investment in an exotic China across cultural forms from literature to theatre, film, music, and others, into the twenty-first century. Chinoiserie can be understood not only as a term applied to objects or cultural forms in a Chinese style but as a practice and a mode of discourse that is constitutive of the racial formations of modernity.” See Diana Yeh, “Staging China, Excising the Chinese: Lady Precious Stream and the Darker Side of Chinoiserie,” in A. Witchard, ed., British Modernism and Chinoiserie (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/14480/1/Staging%20China%20Excising%20the%20Chinese.pdf.

³ “Karen Tam & Shellie Zhang in Conversation” at the Koffler Centre of the Arts, January 26, 2020.

4 Su Zheng, “Music Here and Now: A Diasporic Soundscape in a Global City,” in Claiming diaspora: music, transnationalism, and cultural politics in Asian/Chinese America (Oxford University Press, 2010), 137.

⁵ W.C. Ng, “Chinatown Theatre as Transnational Business: New Evidence from Vancouver during the Exclusion Era,” BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly 148 (2005), 25–54.
 

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Karen Tam lives and works in Montréal and holds an MFA in Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths (University of London). Since 2000, she has exhibited her work and participated in residencies in North America, Europe and China, including the Deutsche Börse Residency at the Frankfurter Kunstverein (Germany), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada), and CUE Art Foundation (USA). Her works are in museum, corporate, and private collections in Canada, United States, and United Kingdom. Tam is a contributor to Alison Hulme’s (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). She is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau.

Henry Heng Lu is a curator, artist and programmer of moving images, living between Vancouver and Toronto. Currently, he is Curator at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. He has presented independent projects through Creative Time Summit, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, CONTACT Photography Festival, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shenzhen, The New Gallery, Vtape, Trinity Square Video, and Toronto Fringe Festival. His writing has been published by Canadian Art, ArtAsiaPacific, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, C Magazine, ArchDaily, and for Richmond Art Gallery, PLATFORM Gallery and Gardiner Museum. Lu holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. He is co-founder of Call Again, a mobile initiative/collective committed to creating space for contemporary Asian diasporic artistic practices, through exhibitions, screenings and roundtables. 
 

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Essay: Henry Heng Lu. Design: Tony Hewer. Editing: Shannon Anderson.
Koffler Gallery installation photos: Toni Hafkenscheid
Digital Publication to the exhibition Karen Tam: the chrysanthemum has opened twelve times. 
Presented by the Koffler Gallery | January 23 – March 29, 2020 | Curator: Mona Filip
 
© Koffler Centre of the Arts, 2020, in collaboration with the individual contributors. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-928175-21-6.