![]() ![]() “I told them what my name was and they were like, ‘We’re Tams too!’” She discovered that the owners had previously worked for a Chinese restaurant in Montreal before moving east. When she was preparing for her installation in Halifax, she took a ferry across the harbour to the neighbouring town of Dartmouth when she came across the Sun Sun Café. ![]() It turned out one of their relatives was from the same tiny village as Tam’s great-grandfather. In Brandon, Tam encountered a family that had originally opened a Chinese restaurant in Mexico before moving north to Canada. She preceded each installation with a kind of informal residency, spending up to two months interviewing restaurant owners, collecting objects and “finding long-lost relatives,” says Tam. ![]() Over the next several years, she created installations in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, as well as in small cities like Brandon, Manitoba, and Lethbridge, Alberta. Her first installation, No MSG at Friendship Dinner, was exhibited at the Khyber Centre for the Arts in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and it generated enough interest that Tam was able to take it on tour across Canada. She began looking around the space with fresh eyes, admiring the red vinyl booths she had loved sitting in as a kid, noting the spackled ceiling and fake brick walls that gave the space “a tavern feel.” When she needed a topic for her Master of Fine Art thesis, she decided to create a quintessential Chinese restaurant. That coincided with her parents’ decision to sell their restaurant. “They must have thought I was the dumbest adult.” “I was put in Grade 3 with eight year olds,” she says. She hadn’t gone to Chinese school as a kid, but as she grew older she became more interested in connecting with her family’s roots – although when she finally enrolled in Chinese classes, it was to study Mandarin, not the Cantonese her family spoke at home. None of this seemed especially remarkable until Tam began studying art at university. “I try to take those elements and create these visual cues, or aural cues, that lets people know they are entering into this kind of space.” “Everything about it brings visitors to this imaginary China,” says Tam. They are filled with red lanterns and traditional ink paintings of mountains and bamboo auspicious names like Golden Dragon and China Garden are advertised in fonts like Rickshaw and Wonton, which mimic brush strokes to evoke a sense of the exotic. Image courtesy Karen Tam.įood provides an invisible backdrop to Tam’s work, but what really interests her is the spaces these restaurants have created. Gold Mountain Restaurant Montagne d’Or (2017). In her book Chop Suey Nation, Hui travelled across Canada to meet the restaurateurs behind these eateries and taste the often surprising creations their kitchens have produced, from fried macaroni in Quebec to ginger beef in Calgary. Many of these serve what journalist Ann Hui calls “chop suey cuisine”: dishes made with Chinese techniques and affordable local ingredients, adapted to suit North American palates that favour sweet flavours and crunchy textures. There are around 50,000 Chinese restaurants in North America, some of them anonymous urban takeaway joints, others small-town institutions that serve as a gathering place for the entire community. “I think it’s something everyone can relate to or connect to,” she says. Over the past two decades, she has investigated the unheralded life of an 1930s-era artist, contemplated the meaning of chinoiserie and worked on Gold Mountain Restaurants, a series of immersive installations based on Chinese restaurants across Canada. She didn’t know it at the time, but those early years living above Restaurant aux Sept Bonheurs set Tam down a path that has led her to explore the importance of Chinese restaurants-and other Chinese-Canadian spaces-as a contemporary artist. “I don’t think anyone made them like that.” “I loved my dad’s egg rolls,” she grins, remembering how she used to dip them in homemade plum sauce, which was actually made with Quebec pumpkins, not plums. Karen Tam grew up above her family’s Chinese restaurant in Montreal – and she most definitely had a favourite dish on its expansive menu. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |