ORIENTALLY YOURS | KAREN TAM
05.06.2007 | 06.10.2007
Karen Tam’s Orientally Yours examines the discrepancies between traditional and westernized Chinese traditions. Below, Tam describes how the restaurants she takes inspiration from mirror the constructed identity of Canada’s Chinese immigrant culture:
House of Wong, Jardin Chow Chow Garden, Big Wok (Big Trouble) Café, and Gold Mountain Restaurant are part of a cross-Canada traveling exhibition. The Chinese restaurants in North America act as a metaphor for an imaginary China, imagined by the West and as a place recreated by the Chinese in the West. I examine the issues and associations that many people have with Chinese culture and are often linked with Chinese restaurants. Following the Gold Rushes and the construction of the railroads, Chinese communities developed in Canada and emigrants began to open up laundry and restaurant businesses. Along with the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant is the idea of producing food or objects especially for the Western taste. Dishes such as chop suey and fortune cookies were actually invented in North America and fed to the West as what it construed as “real” and “authentic” Chinese.
First coming out of a need to speak of the history of Chinese Canadians and the hardships and racism they faced, this work reflects my childhood experience of growing up in a restaurant environment. This installation has taken on more of a collaborative aspect as I enlist the help of local residents, whether within or outside of the Chinese communities, to recreate a (non-functioning) typical Chinese restaurant. In recent incarnations such as Shangri-la Café and No MSG at Friendship Dinner(Nor Cats), I deconstructed and reconstructed the Chinese restaurant to see which elements are signifiers and play a role in influencing Western perceptions of the Chinese. I used certain objects in restaurant décor which seemed to be present in almost every Chinese restaurant and this included plants (living and almost-dead ones), lanterns, landscape imagery, rope light decoration, handwritten signs promoting lunch specials, and the use of stereotypical fonts for the text. In keeping with the historical role of Chinese restaurants as centers of social activities, special events such as “Pirated Movie Night,” “Chinese Games and Karaoke Night” are offered, while viewers are encouraged to bring their lunches and hold their own activities in the House of Wong,
I am interested in how both the restaurant and immigrant experiences may have shaped the lives of the restaurateurs, as well as how they themselves view and perceive Westerners. Through the food, dish names, ingredients, cooking methods, business names, décor, restaurant menus, language(s) of communication, and other cultural signifiers, the Chinese Canadian restaurant becomes a site for identity (mis)perceptions between Western and Chinese cultures. I hope to show honour and respect for the workers who lived through difficult times in order to earn a living, as well as stir up memories of going to or working in these disappearing family-owned chop suey houses.
My current research/production project, Pagoda Pads, will culminate in a series of small modern-day chinoiserie rooms. Recent years have seen the return of the exotic, of the Far East, in Western popular culture. This is not something new; there has been a fascination with the East since the days of the China export trade and Silk Road, in travel journals, ships laden with spices, silk, tea and other exotic ware. Even at that time, as the market was being flooded by products made in China and produced for the Western taste, overseas Chinese were targeted by racist laws and deemed inassimilable aliens.
Similar to my previous installation series, Gold Mountain Restaurant, I would like to reconstruct certain elements of a fictive Cathay or Orient using the language of interior décor, fashion magazines and television shows. Taking cues from these sources, each space will be decorated with the must-have exotic accessories and furnishings of the season as well as photographs, embroidered rice-bags, paper-cutouts, text, and other objects that have a more critical and racist slant. Wallpapers, lanterns, and large paper-cutouts evoking the fads of using hand-painted Chinese papers in the 18th century (as seen in such chinoiserie fantasies like the Royal Pavilion in Brighton) and toiles de Jouy will have images from Chinese restaurant iconography, blue-and-white wares from the Chinese export-trade, political cartoons and posters of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I want to play off notions of authenticity by producing my own faux antiques and by recreating as many DIY projects as presented and offered in mass culture media outlets and found on the Internet. The background music to the installations would be a selection of Orient-inspired pieces by Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as racist parodies of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Karen Tam is a Montréal-based artist and curator whose research focuses on the constructions and imaginations of cultures and communities through her installations in which she recreates Chinese restaurants, opium dens, and other sites of cultural encounters. Since 2000, she has exhibited her work and participated in residencies in Canada, America, and the UK. She holds an M.F.A. in Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
