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Plural

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Feature

**Michelle Bui** is a Montreal based artist working in photography and sculpture. Her research lies in the use of material culture as a creative modality. Looking for points of combustion between objects, Bui elicits an array of physical feelings that conjure both pleasurable and confounding sensations, offering a space where sensory identity can unfold. 


**Shellie Zhang** is a multidisciplinary artist. She creates images, objects, and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity, and assimilation are implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences.


##### Working in photography, sculpture, and installation, artists Michelle Bui’s and Shellie Zhang’s individual practices share an obsession with gathering items and reconfiguring them in a studio setting. Their impulse to collect organic material as well as plastic and found objects explores the role of consumption, accumulation, identity, and the body in a world dominated by a culture of material excess. As contemporary artists creating work in community, Bui and Zhang discuss their overlapping artistic practices and examine the sources of their shared language. 

>**Shellie Zhang:** I feel like I’m talking to a fellow hobbyist collector, what I imagine someone who collects postage stamps feels when they find someone who shares their specific and mutual obsession. I’ve always described my photos of objects and assemblages as portraits of characters invented by me, created by chance, or built from a common source. It’s a constant back-and forth of how much we are defined by objects and how they define us, or in Sara Ahmed’s words, “what orients us toward or away from things and how they become sticky with mean ing.”[^1]  Would you describe your images as portraits? Do you identify as a photographer, or feel more like you use image making as a means for constructing and capturing? 

**Michelle Bui:** I’m excited to connect with you, it feels like talking to someone who already knows me in some sense. While the definition of a photographer is quite vast and multifaceted, I’ve always struggled with being identified as one. Perhaps I could best define my practice as a bricolage, or a precarious sculpture that becomes stabilized through photography. My work often depicts a moment of balance, represent ing the transient nature of things and materials. There’s a fragility that appears in the passage of time that I hope translates into my images, too. 

I admire how your work approaches the history of immigration, such as your piece _Believe It Or Not_ (2020–2021). There’s a project I’ve been wanting to pursue—photographing the ceramic plates, a gold-link bracelet, and family photo albums that my uncle brought over when he immigrated from Vietnam in the ’80s. He brought what was the most essential and precious, knowing he wouldn’t be able to go back. I’ve never spoken to him about it for many reasons—shyness and language being obstructions to any conversation, but also because we have never addressed that specific moment in my family, what it was like to move away from your home and experiencing trauma and displacement.

In that sense, the objects my uncle carried with him do speak to his identity and are a part of his history. While they don’t hold the specificity of words them selves, it’s clear the objects we choose to surround ourselves with function as a way of constructing and negotiating our social relations as well as our identities. In a broader sense, I wonder who we are in this era of the disposable where waste takes up more and more space. How do we define the idea of overripe or decay during this era of excess? Recently, photography has made the most sense as a medium for me to capture the concreteness of things, their surfaces, but also how they can operate as forms of detachment and reverie. Surface can be misleading and there is an openness to that idea of the envelope (the skin of the image) that relates to portraiture, too. 

>**SZ:** _Believe It Or Not_ was one of my more research-driven projects. As I slowly learned more about the history of the Chinese community in Saskatoon, and how their Chinatown was demolished, I started to think about what evidence of these stories could look like. What resulted was a mirroring of the court and legal documents I scoured through, and I imagined the objects in the works I produced as evidence of these histories, perhaps to interject life into some of the stories that are dying or buried. I also included some subtle allusions to the board game “Clue” to personify the objects. As the artist, I felt like I was playing the role of a detective, trying to piece this history together. 

>You hit on something else that’s resonating with me, how the existence and journey of an object tells so much in itself. I’m also hesitant to ask family about certain histories attached to items, though I know there’s a story there. Why is an object here and how did it get here? What does it mean for it to be here? An object’s existence alone is so intriguing. I wonder what it’s seen, heard, smelled, and touched. 

**MB:** In recent projects, I’ve been working exclusively with brand-new things or fresh produce like fruits, flowers, and offal that I find in shops in Montreal to access the “newness” of store-bought objects. They’re often packaged in a way that makes it easy for us to buy them, and they feel less charged because they’re presented to us as new and available in infinite quantities. But I think the desire to camouflage the efforts of production is what makes them interesting. What are we trying to hide exactly? 

>**SZ:** Something you do so well in your work is the use of raw materials such as muscle and flesh. It ani mates the tension, moisture, and rot in your subjects, until they almost appear to be breathing, such as in your piece _Twisted Musk _(2019). I’ve never seen such patience applied to tripe and seeing it so delicately laid on black leather with flowers moved me. It was like the material was getting the praise it deserved. 

**MB:** I remember fighting a lot with the piece of tripe and wanting to control the folds and curls. In the end, letting the offal take its own shape made it less about imitation and decor and more about unveiling something fragile that is usually kept inside the body.I wanted to circle back to the subject of places like the Dollar Store—I think we both tap into these spaces in our practices, but we differentiate in terms of the objects we select in drugstores, hardware stores, conveniences stores, and grocery stores. The smell of all these places is the ever-present scent of plastic, a particular perfume that screams “new!” and casts such an exuberant sense of optimism; all it can do is collapse.

I love your piece _Ode to Spring_ (2022) because it reminds me of those weirdly upbeat TV ads from the ’90s. The Sunny Delight one in particular comes to mind. I remember that if only we could drink enough of that juice, we’d become happy and bouncy like the kids in that ad. There was a possibility to fit in if you bought, and consumed, the “right things.” 

>**SZ:** I remember when I moved to the US as a child, these images were a promise of fitting in, and a way to learn about a new culture through the language of consumption. There’s an acute awareness that buying things won’t bring to fruition the realities they sell us; we’ll never be those Sunny Delight kids. But I like the feeling of desire they convey, and I wanted to simply stay in that moment. It’s a bit like a crush—a fantasy that’s more potent than the real thing itself. The abundance of plastic in the spaces we frequent feels like a fitting material to elude the malleability and potential of what we saw in those images. 

**MB:** _Ode to Spring_ also really captures that sense of cringe that fuels both our practices. The confounding sensations of familiarity, the optimism and excess, the desire to blend in—all those ideas and feeling are entangled and revealed within that single piece. I like how your image invites the viewer with bright colours and familiar textures, but also somehow feels like a façade. The image is so perfect you wonder if it’s real. It contains an overflow heightened by the knowledge of an inevitable drought. 

>**SZ:** I’m so glad that you mentioned cringe! There’s something about the uncomfortable that’s so alluring and hard to look away from. I think some of the items I pick toe the line between the still-life tradition, musicological displays, and visual merchandising. Sometimes I have to give myself restrictions to narrow down the things in an image. I’ll limit myself to locations, a certain aesthetic, or some other more personal narrative-driven criteria. 

>Often, I feel affinities with objects that are imported because they share a similar journey of coming here as I did. Anne Anlin Cheng discusses how the racialized history of the yellow woman has created a human ontology indebted to commodity, artifice, and “objectness.”[^2] Maybe this is why I look to objects for both comfort and complication. 

**MB:** Long before we started this conversation, I’d been thinking about how our works overlap, especially in our tabletop compositions. I also bought similar fruits and textiles as the ones you use—a royal-blue and lavender silk from the “oriental” section of the fabric store—though I’ve never used them for any photo set-ups. Apples, pears, grapes, oranges could appear in my work, but the pitayas, lychees, bitter melons, and other fruits and vegetables you’ve photo graphed in your series _Offerings to Both Past and Future_ (2018–2019), while very seductive and à propos, can’t. I think using “Asian” or “exotic” fruits would veer too closely to my Vietnamese identity, which I embrace at times but also feels foreign to me. It’s a complicated relationship and vastly multilayered. I’m certainly skirting around this question of identity within my practice as a second generation immigrant. Perhaps the objects I long for, accumulate, or hold on to can speak about that better than my own words. 

 >**SZ:** It’s interesting to hear your experience with objects that are seen as exotic. I was asked once why I include these self-exotifying things in my work. I found the question to be telling of what the person asking considered exotic. Since I work with things in my home, in my friends’ and family’s homes, or found or purchased from places I’m comfortable in, these objects have always been the opposite of exotic to me. There is also a visual history we have inherited, and I find it much more exciting to develop autonomy in defining and shaping the future of that object and visual language. I love to work with dead stock, things that aren’t expected to sell anymore. Instead of making existing objects into new forms and structures, I like to work with things that are freshly out of style, kitsch, or loud (yet overlooked) to maybe give a critical lens to shifting desires and trends. I’d love to hear how you pick your materials too. So many of your images emphasize a vacuum-sealed glossiness or high shine. Textures feel so import ant in your work. 

**MB:** Lately, my images have become more liquid and mutable, as if there is a desire to crush the objects I’ve accumulated to see if that veneer of glittery optimism is still present. A lot of my process is like cooking—layering objects and textures using gelatin, boiled water, egg whites, sugar, and plastic film either to slow down or accelerate the process of transformation.

It feels cliché to say, but it does bring me back to those memories in the kitchen with my mom, where we communicated through gestures. I remember gently peeling the imperial-roll pastry sheets for chả giò (Vietnamese fried spring rolls). It had to be a precise gesture, going too fast or at the wrong angle would tear the sheet. Putting down the filling, wet and cold, with speckles of bright orange carrots, translucent vermicelli, wood ear mushrooms, and pink meat to which we added raw eggs to make the texture even more goopy. The sound it made when you separated the mixture is how you knew if you’d succeeded. The right ratio makes the perfect tear sound.

We’d also sometimes prepare stuffed pig stomach, rubbing the surface with salt under running water and filling the stomach with ear cartilage for extra gnaw. Then we’d sew the stomach like a balloon to hold everything in, a black stitch tracing a line on that elegant, curved shape, and adding a bow before plopping it in the oven. In all honesty, the result was never that great in terms of look and taste. The meat would always leak through holes we didn’t properly stitch and the whole thing was an unappetizing beige blob. But the messy process, the smell, the textures, the colours, all of that clearly stayed with me.

>**SZ:** Not cliché at all. There’s a real skill to bundling all those delicious components and juices together. It makes me think about the delicate balance of push-and-pull in some of your works. There’s a clear allusion to the body as well. 

**MB:** The series at Esker, _Naked Excess_ (2022), was produced while I was pregnant, with a good chunk of it completed after giving birth to my son, Milan. I sometimes joke that the series are simply pictures of my placenta, which perhaps is not too far from reality. The images were made during a period where I was extremely self-aware of what I was ingesting, and inspecting everything that I was eating, but you can only control so much. The work at the studio also evolved in the same way, a mix of organic and plastics all melded in together. Some objects ended up in the image after careful deliberations while others are fortuitous accidents.

>**SZ:** The placenta is a magical container. In ancient China, there were ways of burying the placenta in auspicious directions that would impact the child and mother.[^3] It seems like such a beautiful tradition, paying respect to something that protected us so tenderly. I’m reminded of artist Winnie Truong’s recent project “Herbaria” (2022) [^4]where there are so many organic figures that allude to the post-pregnancy body, or on the synthetic end, Ani Liu’s works [^5] with long plastic tubes of a milk-like substance. Maybe these practices and artefacts are a way of visually manifesting a labour that is often made invisible. 

**MB:** In your _Aesthetic of Surfaces_ (2017) and _Cornucopias_ (2019–2020) series, you use photographs and sculpture in the same installation. There’s also the presence of an altar—did you have one in your house growing up? 

>**SZ:** We didn’t have an altar at home, though sometimes, we’d pay respect to the dead at the homes of extended family or in public. With _Offerings to Both Past and Future_ and _Cornucopias_, I was inspired by the act of leaving fruit on graves and altars at home, at businesses, or in restaurants. I felt that for this body of work, I had to include plastic fruits and bring a sculptural configuration into the images. While it’s terrible that plastic is forever, sometimes it’s a useful surrogate for the real, unavailable thing or to help sustain a gesture.

>These objects are so packed with hope, promise, and wishes that the act of acquiring them and then leaving them for another is a transference of these sentiments. When we were still in a vaccine shortage during the pandemic, a small demand for joss[^ 6] vaccines emerged. Families would buy paper/cardboard vaccines to burn and send to their loved ones, a way to give them something they weren’t able to get while they were living and perhaps as a form of closure. I cried for a week whenever I thought of this. 

**MB:** The pragmatism of plastic is hard to beat. I appreciate seeing offerings that feel so removed from the ancestral gesture, like a bowl of popcorn next to fresh fruit. It adds a layer of humour that appears in our work, too. The flashy and junky aspect of some of the objects and materials we choose often creates a sensation of friction that skirts very closely toward bad taste. I think we both play with the notion of absurdity within our practice to reflect excesses in the material world.

I had an altar at home that my par ents prayed to for specific celebrations, but the one that struck my senses was created by my uncle, the family’s eldest son, for Đám Giỗ (a Vietnamese death anniversary) and Tết (Lunar New Year Festival), offering the most ripe, perfect fruits and flowers and reserving the best bites from the dishes the family had prepared. It was a space of solemnity but also of fear as a child. It felt as if those objects and portraits could really carry my thoughts to the elders and vice versa.

Do you ever get tired of accumulating objects as part of your practice? Sometimes I wish I could be a painter and paint my own objects instead of buying them, or that I could mix the right colour on my own instead of searching existing objects for the perfect hue.

>**SZ:** There does seem to be some parallels with painting—finding the perfect light to make the material shine a certain way, attempting to capture the likeness of the ephemeral in an image. The compulsion to collect feels hereditary. I don’t know if it will ever stop. Making work is maybe a coping mechanism for making sense of my hoarding. I’m still trying to find the balance between being intentional and intuitional. 

[^1]: Sara Ahmed, _The Cultural Politics of Emotion_ (New York: Routledge, 2004), 11. 
[^2]: Anne Anlin Cheng, _Ornamentalism_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 
[^3]: Sarah Hollister, “Placenta Burial Rituals,” https://placen tarisks.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/09/Placenta burial-rituals-from-around the-world-handout.pdf 
[^4]: “Herbaria,” Patel Brown, July 30 to August 27, 2022, https://patelbrown.com/ winnie-truong-herbaria 
[^5]: “Untitled, Feeding Through Time and Space,” Ani Liu, accessed October 14, 2022, https://ani-liu.com/ feeding-through-space-time 
[^6]: Types of paper offerings made to be burned as offerings to the dead. 


Writer

Chinatowns are complex sites that embody shared histories of survival spanning generations, amidst ongoing struggles with displacement and anti-Asian racism. Guest edited by Steph Wong Ken, this issue gathers artistic explorations of Chinatowns across Canada to reinterpret and reimagine their pasts, presents, and futures. From architectural shifts and hidden stories within their visual representation, to building community bonds through a garden, queer diasporic library, and pact against gentrification, Chinatown is revealed as a home for multitudes.


Chinatown

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Sculpture

Photography

Artists Michelle Bui and Shellie Zhang discuss the role of accumulation and excess in their work, highlighting the power of objects to hold hidden and obvious histories.


Artificial Artifacts

Artificial Artifacts: Michelle Bui and Shellie Zhang in conversation 


Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works.
She has held fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Parsons School of Design,
The New School; and Performa Biennial. Her writing has been published in _Art in America_,
_Artforum_, _TheAtlantic.com_, _The Brooklyn Rail_, _frieze_, _Fashion Theory_, and _Journal of Curatorial Studies_, among others.

In the summer of 2021, at the corner of René-Lévesque and Saint-Laurent boulevards in Montreal’s China town, an empty lot lit up every night. A large tree stood in the centre, Karen Tam’s _Arbre à souhaits_ (Wishing tree) (2021), festooned with twinkling lights, orange plastic spheres, red ribbons, and 1,300 placards covered in handwritten Chinese characters representing seven wishes: longevity, health, fortune, prosperity, happiness, strength, and resilience. A stage encircled the tree, ringed with picnic tables and a series of kiosks. Entitled _Place des souhaits_ (Wishing square) (2021), Tam’s collaborative project with designer Jean de Lessard transformed the 35,000-square-foot (over 3,000-square-metre) lot into an intergenerational community space for performances, workshops, or simply a place to rest one’s weary bones and eat some dumplings. Some nights, the stage played host to Chinese opera, decorated with a colourful forest of 1,000 flags, and on others, it became a night market or a casual meeting place.

A makeshift park at the border of Chinatown and the surrounding neighbourhoods felt particularly dreamy amid the disturbing rise of anti-Asian violence, and the anticipation of a season of revelry and bacchanal following a long, difficult year. In 2002, SARS emptied out Chinatowns, and the COVID-19 pandemic also led to less people frequenting these neighbourhoods on a larger scale. The opening of Tam’s installation at the start of the summer created a safe public space in Montreal’s Chinatown to be seen, surrounded by community members, staking ground. With _Place des souhaits_, Tam and her collaborator de Lessard created a space for hosting artistic openness and intergenerational relationships, reinforcing the value of physical, public space as essential to cultural and social infrastructure. On a less formal level, the space felt like a soothing balm, lighting up an area that prides itself on resiliency and strength. The site-specific work synthesized much of what Tam’s oeuvre has explored over the past two decades, connecting the spatial imaginaries of Chinatowns in Canada to the ongoing formation of Chinese diasporic identity.

The daughter of parents of the Cantonese diaspora, Tam spent many hours in her family’s Chinese restaurant, Aux Sept Bonheurs (Seventh Heaven), in Montreal’s east end. In family photographs, she is pint sized, wearing a pink shirt, Mary-Janes, and barrettes in her hair, sitting in the side doorway to Aux Septs Bonheurs. In another, Tam as a toddler stands on the restaurant kitchen’s cooktop gripping two wok handles with a big grin on her face, while her father, the chef, holds her in his arms. Tam still has the same warm and open smile, and upon meeting her for the first time on a video call, I’m immediately disarmed and feeling major sister vibes. She tells me that she grew up with a network of friends, family, and other restauranteurs who would help one another out; even after retiring and selling his business in 2004, Tam’s father trained successive Chinese restauranteurs who took over Aux Septs Bonheurs.

I asked Tam if she worked in the family restaurant after school and on weekends, the fate of many immigrant kids. She only lasted one summer, before returning to her true callings: music and art. At one point, music almost superseded her artistic ambitions; a trained classical pianist, Tam decided a graduate degree in music would be her back-up plan if she wasn’t accepted into the MFA in sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But her career has always been a balance of priorities and happenstance; after completing her MFA, Tam took a research trip to the United Kingdom and happened to meet a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, who persuaded her to pursue a PhD in cultural studies—something she had only considered for the golden years of her life.

This flow between disciplines and practices acts as a type of architecture for the way Tam approaches her artistic practice. While completing her PhD, she wrote essays and articles on _shanzhai_ culture—a Chinese term to denote fake, counterfeit, or parody consumer products. Her dissertation examined the corporeal experience of space, referencing the development of the North American Chinese restaurant from the 19th century until the present, a project that challenged her to think culturally about her own artistic practice and, more broadly, how she employs historical context in her large-scale installations. In some ways, a micro-sized form of Chinatown can be found in the diasporic Chinese family restaurant. Spatially, the Chinese restaurant envelops an imaginary of multiple diasporic Chinas, asking: who are these spaces for, and how are they reflected onto us?

Tam leans on her family’s history in the restaurant industry to create site-specific work like _Place des souhaits_, referencing the cultural and social functions of these spaces. As much community centres as they are businesses, the two functions cannot be easily divorced from one another. Rarely are exchanges that occur in small, independently-owned businesses purely transactional; rather, they are cultural and social interactions, the connective tissue of everyday life. Sharing a meal with others might be one of the most sustaining and generative acts of care, taking the time with loved ones to nourish the mind and heart. All these types of essential, community-based activities are given the space to unfold in Tam’s approach to public installation, transposing the interior socio-cultural dynamics of a family restaurant to an outdoor space and expanding opportunities for these kinships to flourish. By combining various elements of Chinese diasporic culture into one—shopkeeping, gatherings in public space, performance—Place des souhaits remakes the artwork as community space for a wider au dience, including those who may not ever pass through the doors of a gallery or museum.



All-encompassing and meticulously researched, Tam’s exhibitions are curatorial ventures that seem to negate institutional curation, blurring the lines between art production and the recitation of cultural history. Her work rarely focuses on her as a solo artist in the spot light. Rather, she centres artists from the margins of Canadian art history, as in _With wings like clouds hung from the sky_ 大鵬就振翼 (2017–2022)—where Tam created an imagined artist studio for LEE Chao Nam 李 趙南, a Chinese Canadian painter who lived in Victoria in the 1930s and was a contemporary and friend to Emily Carr. The work was sited at multiple institutions; conceived at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria presented an expanded iteration of the exhibition before it toured to the Richmond Art Gallery and made its final stop at the Varley Art Gallery in Markham. Taking its English and Chinese titles from a poem carved onto the walls of San Francisco’s Angel Island detention/immigration centre, the exhibition looks at the life and art of Lee, whom Tam discovered while reading Carr’s journals.[^1] In each iteration, Tam shifted the exhibition according to its community context in each city, inviting local Chinese brush painters to show their works alongside those of Lee, Carr, QI Baishi, LUI Luk Chun 呂陸川, and other artists from the Chinese diaspora.

Acting as a cultural historian, Tam converses with these late artists to create new spaces untethered by the weight of our contemporary moment, linear history, and geographical borders. Through various strands of connection—artistic, community, geographic, and cultural—Tam assembles a lineage of ancestral art knowledges and inheritance, including her mother TAM YUEN Yin Law 譚阮嫣娜, a traditional Chinese painter in her own right, and a student of Lui, as well as the younger Tam herself. By placing her mother’s painting of goldfish next to her mother’s favourite painter Qi, and positioning a Carr in proximity, or mixing up the display of “local” artists with more “known” names, Tam questions what makes someone a so-called professional artist, itself a particularly contentious term in the contemporary professionalization of the arts, and another artist an amateur. Who gets to be shown, and who receives recognition? In each reinstallation of the exhibition, the works and spaces inhale and exhale new air, new contexts. The installation also breaks up the linear continuum of art history, creating discursive, visual space for the gaps in the history of art in Canada, and the art of the Chinese diaspora.



Tam’s interest in showcasing the work of her forebearers and her peers has also shaped her curatorial practice. In 2021, she curated “Whose Chinatown?” for Griffin Projects in North Vancouver, which takes a more traditional route in its museological display, exploring the psychogeographic space of Chinatown. Incorporating the works of multiple artists, as well as living and past collectives—including art, zines, family heirlooms, imagery from personal and public archives, and family collections—the exhibition asks, “Who were the early Chinese-Canadian artists?” and explores Chinatown as a spatial imaginary. Rather than focus on marginalization as a productive end, Tam’s exhibition is a haven for diasporic history and cultural production, contra to pop culture’s image of Chinatown as a seedy site for gang violence, turf wars, and illegal gambling dens. The exhibition reflects Tam’s interest in creating scholarly, visual histories that don’t feel fussy or overly pedagogical. As both an artist and a curator, she exerts a quiet confidence over her subject matter, offering a speculative view on how the worlds of Chinese art and art of the Chinese diaspora in Canada might have interacted had they existed at the same time and place, allowing planes of history to collide in a space where kinship, shared vocation, and culture find home.



Tam’s exploration of the concept of remaking and its meaning in her curatorial and artistic work can be linked back to the Chinese practice of _shanzhai_. In her essay “Dolce & Banana: A Shanzhai Creator’s Manual” published in the anthology _The Changing Landscape of China’s Consumerism_ (2014), she notes that “Shanzhai can be used as an appropriative practice in contemporary art, and as a method of resistance, subversion, and critique.”[^2] The term _shanzhai_ can be broadly defined as copying, counterfeiting, and appropriation, but Tam taps into the creativity and innovation embedded in this practice, a counter to what a Western worldview might consider unethical or trademark infringement. In 2012, Tam began making papier-mâché interpretations of Chinese porcelain ware in her sculptural series _The Porcelain Collection_ (2012–present), building up layers of strips of Chinese newspaper, the construction visible just under a painted surface. From the classic blue and white dragon motifs of _The Sporting Life (Golf)_ and _The Sporting Life (Football)_ (both 2015), to the multi colour _Dream of Flying Machines_ (2015), a close inspection reveals their depictions may not be classic from a historical point of view but, rather, depict classical Chinese art as it could be interpreted today: a dragon next to a football or a golf club, rocket and satellites in the latter. By taking from one medium (porcelain) and using another (newspaper) with contemporary imagery, Tam narrows a cultural gap. She notes of this series, “I would probably never be able to acquire the originals, I can in my own way come closer to them through their likeness.”[^3] The works are exercises in a knowing through making, playing on the practice of _shanzhai_ to create new objects that reference historical representations but are wholly authentic unto themselves.

These vessels can be viewed as a metaphor for the many identities that proliferate within the Chinese diaspora, each not quite like the other, an amalgam of “Chineseness” as a cultural imaginary and its specific context in diasporic form. The paper-mâché porcelain ware appear to approximate chinoiserie designs, though like their so-called originals, these too are one of-a-kind and just as true as their forebears, touched and shaped by an artist’s hand, not mere replications made in another medium. Viewed as reproductions or replications, the papier-mâché vases ultimately fail as utilitarian objects; after all, they cannot hold flowers or water. Rather, Tam’s reinscription of certain Chinese motifs like mountains, meanders, or lotus blossoms carries on a lineage of visual culture beyond its roots, broadening their application via a simple, approachable method that can easily be replicated with an everyday material like paper.

The vessels are part of an ongoing series and still circulate in exhibitions today, much like the porcelain objects that inform them. They also move in and out of Tam’s large-scale installations—appearing in her recreations of a curio shop, a storefront window, and a photography studio. 

Many of Tam’s works, in fact, evolve as part of a series, with no definitive enddate, referencing perhaps how cultural production has never been pure, but moves through the world constantly hyphenating, multiplying, and resituating itself in new contexts.


Tam’s _shanzhai_ methods also appear in _With wings like clouds hung from the sky_ 大鵬就振翼. Collaborating with her mother and Lui, Tam painted 300 drawings of birds based on a Carr sketch, a call back to the erasure of Chinese diasporic artists like Lee. While learning through copying has a privileged place in Western art history—painters training in Europe were brought to galleries and salons to sketch the “masters”—the practice has acquired a negative connotation, synonymous with pirated, counterfeit goods, specifically those made in China. The adage that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery might apply here, but Tam’s intention is more about parallels and retracing history rather than straightforward reenactment. Similarly, Tam’s paintings of 12 men named Lee Nam attempt to locate a visage for Nam among the archives of Canada; her depictions speculate that one of these portraits is the Lee in question, and that in depicting him, he is truly seen and known. The knowing, it turns out, does emerge through successive iterations. After the third exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery, a collector approached Tam with a paint ing of Lee’s dated September 1933 (currently it is awaiting authentication), which will be reproduced in a forthcoming publication by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Richmond Art Gallery. As fluid as the identities, lives, and brushstrokes that the exhibition records, _With wings like clouds hung from the sky_ 大鵬就振翼 moves within its own sense of time, mixing the past with the present and future, creating new possibilities for overlap and connection.



Careful in her approach, Tam is not concerned with preserving history. Instead, she recognizes a connection to the past must be informed by engaging with lo cal communities in a continual process of regeneration. From an artist’s studio to domestic interiors, Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, and opium dens, Tam’s serial works continually evolve with each iteration, shifting to accommodate their sites and never present ing a singular narrative. She invites artists historical and contemporary to join her in this remaking; each space is rooted in collaboration, connecting her with her ancestral past while propelling her work into the speculative future. 
It’s uncool to use the term “immersive” now— many times it’s a stretch when used in the contemporary art lexicon—but it perfectly encapsulates Tam’s highly detailed (and deeply _shanzhai_) installations. Visually, she transports the viewer into a time and space that existed long ago, will exist in the future, or never existed in the ways in which she envisions it, creating environments that are entities unto themselves, old and new, present and future all at once. While art historians might write histories from marginalization into the main narrative, Tam does this in the visual form of an exhibition display, creating an artist’s exhibition within an exhibition, a never-ending salon. Her installations could be framed as _shanzhai_ villages in their (re)creations of everyday life, no less sites of invention and reinvention than history itself with its revisions and evolving augmentations. In their doubling and imagining, Tam’s works become new agents of history, authentic and original in their replication. As Tam notes, “If art is a product, then it will be shanzhai-ed.”[^4]

[^1]: Of Lee, Carr wrote: “A young Chinese came to my door carrying a roll of painting. He had heard about the exhibition, had come to show his work to me—beautiful watercolours done in Oriental style. He was very anxious to carry his work further… I invited him to show in place of the flower painter and he hung a beautiful exhibition.” 
[^2]: Karen Tam, “Dolce & Banana: A Shanzhai Creator’s Manual,” in _The Changing Landscape of China’s Consumerism_, ed. Alison Hulme (New York: Chandos Publishing, 2014), 84. 
[^3]: “Sculpture,” Karen Tam, accessed October 16, 2022, https://karentam.ca/sculpture.html 
[^4]: Tam, “Dolce & Banana,” 85.

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Cities

Migration

Charlene K. Lau’s far-ranging profile of artist Karen Tam chronicles Tam’s influences, from her family’s restaurant in Montreal to her scholarly writing on _shanzhai_. Lau examines how Tam’s work reconfigures the Chinese diasporic experience and disrupts the familiar.


The Spatial Imaginaries of Karen Tam 譚嘉文

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