With Chinatowns at risk of disappearing, this artist invites visitors to step inside

Speaking with other members of the Chinese diaspora, Montreal-based artist Karen Tam has picked up a salient piece of wisdom. "Everyone always says, 'Go to a new city and find the Chinatown.'"

"Seeking out different spaces when I visit another Chinatown, I find a little bit of home," she explains, recalling her time as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, away from her family in Quebec.

As Chinatowns across Canada face increasing economic pressures, Tam's artistic practice calls for their preservation as sites of inter-generational exchange.

After the successes of her presentation in last year's Toronto Biennial of Art, Tam is pushing forward with another series of major accomplishments. This includes a critically acclaimed project at the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, which opened earlier this month, and the publication of her first major monograph, SHEEN-wah-ZREE — a play on the word chinoiserie, which designates Western, orientalist interpretations of Chinese artistic traditions, especially in decorative arts. Exhibiting for over two decades, with notable national and international solo shows to her name, the artist's gift for building community and presenting archival findings through compelling visual narratives is taking centre stage once again.

Describing her early childhood, Tam lays out the biographical foundation of her practice, including the fond memories she has of the Chinese restaurant her parents ran in Montreal. "We lived in the apartment above the family restaurant," she remembers. "I'd go downstairs for snacks or hang out in the backroom and do crafty stuff. One of my parents' friends was an artist. He was a cook for another restaurant."

As a young person living in Montreal, Tam was influenced by other Canadian artists, many of whom employed storytelling in their practices. "An exhibition that really stuck with me was Ed Pien's show at Oboro [titled Ghosts]," she recalls. "I was blown away by the drawings, but also how he created a dark space for visitors to enter. I remember being a little terrified at how art can immerse and surround you completely."

Shaping these inspirations into her own vocabulary, Tam's interdisciplinary practice is often composed of materially rich, immersive environments that engage with local Chinese cultural heritage. An avid researcher and self-described "nerd for history," her work effortlessly bridges a socially conscious approach to artmaking with contemporary installation, sculpture, performance and new media techniques.

"I always try to make my installations respond to the actual space where it's presented," Tam says. "The architectural elements often determine where to place an object in relationship to another."

One of her most important projects to date was an exhibition at Montreal's McCord Stewart Museum titled Swallowing Mountains, which looked at the role of women in shaping Montreal's Chinatown in the 19th and 20th centuries. There, Tam transformed sections of the gallery into alcoves mimicking shop windows. Combining her own sculptures, Chinese shadow puppets, drawings and textiles works with photographs loaned by families, elders and people close to the Chinatown community as well as from the McCord Stewart collection, the artist created a dialogue between these diverse living archives.

Bridging different perspectives, Tam constructs architectural spaces that draw on the artifacts of cultural memory. At the Liverpool Biennial, curated by Marie-Anne McQuay, the Canadian artist has found yet another receptive home for her work. Scent of Thunderbolts 雷霆之息 is an adaptation from her installation at the Toronto Biennial of Art, yet the work takes on a new life at Pine Court, a registered provider of social housing in the Chinatown of the northwestern English city.

In a former office with a low ceiling, the thick, green forest of fabric bamboo shoots and other props offers a warm and welcoming environment. Tam thinks of the installation as a "reimagined Cantonese opera stage." Cantonese opera was one of the first forms of entertainment available to Chinese communities abroad, the artist says. The subject has been a focus of her archival research. Behind a curtain, a playful cutout tiger beckons attention, and a pair of ceremonial-looking red satin covered seats in the middle of the repurposed space invite the audience to sit down and take it all in.

"Interspersed are what I call soundscapes of interior Chinatown in Montreal," Tam explains to host Vid Simoniti on the Art Against the World podcast, "looking at the different spaces where I think most visitors to Chinatown don't necessarily have access to or maybe aren't aware of them. One would be my grandmother's apartment, the week after she passed away. So you can hear that ambient silence, but then you hear also the sounds of construction of the building next door, the development next door. Other sounds would be in a Chinatown restaurant, but at one of the Hum Clan Association annual banquets. It's full of laughter and very noisy."

Tam's constructed spaces have multiple functions. They act as a physical gathering ground for members of the community, they memorialize the past and inscribe it into a new record, and they offer an opportunity for non-Chinese audiences to become more informed while reconsidering cultural assumptions about the Chinese diaspora.

"When we think of archives it's usually documents — something that's two-dimensional," she tells Simoniti. "We lose the oral history, the sound aspect. What did something sound like back in the day? What did Chinatown sound like?"

This appreciation for the sights and sounds of culture, with an emphasis on the background noises that make up the identities of a community, harkens back to Tam's search for Chinatown when she was a student. "In Chicago's Chinatown, you can still hear Toishanese on the streets and that's something I grew up with," Tam says. "That's the dialect I speak with my parents. For that generation, it's a special kind of nostalgia."

Much like her installation in Liverpool suggests, memory is embodied, passed on through sound, space, people and experience.