Taking the pretext of appointments to the Order of Arts and Letters of Quebec, The duty takes you into the imagination of men and women whose work, exemplary in several respects, contributes to promoting culture.
Alice Ming Wai Jim welcomes us to her office at Concordia University. She is immediately happy to show us some works of art. “I wear many hats,” says the contemporary art professor in English. Since 2023, she has been at the head of a research chair called Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions. Objective: examine the impact of movements for social justice and decolonization on the world of museology and the role that collection curators play there.
“What was extraordinary for me in coming back to Montreal to teach at Concordia was that I was born and raised right next door, on a street corner. » The daughter of immigrants, she lived with her mother in a modest apartment in a building on Mackay Street, above a photocopy center. “This area of Montreal was very different then. » It was that of a vanished working world. “The neighborhood has changed a lot. »
His parents came from Hong Kong. “I am a child of Expo 67. My parents were already living in Halifax in 1967, but without knowing each other. They met in Montreal, during the Expo. » They will settle on the island. His mother will be a nurse at the Royal Victoria. As a child, she attended the FACE school. “I was in the same cohort as Mitsou. There was also Rufus Wainwright, who was a little younger. » For her, it’s not music that interests her, but art. “We were near the Museum of Fine Arts. I was still there! I went there all the time. For me, it was very important, the Museum of Fine Arts. Very important. »
The Chinese restaurant is important for understanding the Asian community in Canada
The Chinese restaurant
His father, after having tried in vain to open a Chinese restaurant, will live on expedients. “The Chinese restaurant is important for understanding the Asian community in Canada,” explains Alice Ming Wai Jim with a broad smile. The cliché of the Chinese restaurant, with its walls all in red, its stylized dragons and everything you want, she admires how the contemporary artist Karen Tam, originally from Montreal, took advantage of it and played with it very skillfully. “She transformed the idea of the Chinese restaurant from her childhood into a representation where everything is fake in order to lead the audience to the story, through a restaurant menu. Amid the fake Chinese lanterns and the cheap exoticism of the North American Chinese restaurant, people get caught up in the game.”
In fact, there is nothing so Chinese about the world of Chinese restaurants. “It especially speaks to North American tastes, tastes for sweet and crunchy. But also our perceptions of a whole world that we continue to ignore. »
The Chinese restaurant is an important cultural fact for understanding Canadian and North American society, underlines the professor. There are more than 50,000 in North America. “Yet what lies behind the Chinese restaurant goes unnoticed. Nobody questions it. » When observed closely, it can help us understand the racist laws that were imposed against Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century.e century, explains Alice Min Wai Jim. “Opening a Chinese restaurant was often all that remained possible for families deprived of work because of these racist laws. » Laws of which there is little mention in the official historical account.
Unfair laws
In 1885, the year Louis Riel was hanged, the government of John A. Macdonald passed a law requiring Chinese immigrants to pay a special tax of $50, the equivalent of nearly $2,000 in 2024. This measure was the subject of a public apology from the federal government in 2006.
Beginning in 1923, a law against Chinese immigration was passed in Canada. This law will be in force until 1947. Alice Min Wai Jim believes that much remains to be understood about the effects of these laws and the social framework that resulted from them for the development of all Canadian society.
We are witnessing a renaissance of racialized artists. For me, that’s a good thing.
“We know that the Chinese worked to build the railway from one end of Canada to the other. When they no longer had jobs on the railways, they settled down and tried to survive. They were prohibited from obtaining professional licenses. There weren’t many places they could work. » Being aware of the various layers that make up our world leads us to understand that history does not unfold before us like a continuous thread.
“It is to help make this reality and art known that I returned to Montreal,” explains Alice Ming Wai Jim. In the early 2000s, as a young academic, she was responsible for the collections at the Vancouver International Center for Contemporary Asian Art. “I was the only one at that time dealing with something similar in Canada. That has changed since then. I was there from 2003 to 2006.”
She therefore hopes that we will be more interested in what is being done here, on the side of the Asian community. “We pay more attention to what comes from elsewhere, forgetting the place of the Asian community here. I’m thinking, for example, of the work of Mei-Kuei Feu, an interdisciplinary artist from Montreal who talks about gentrification through recycling. We are witnessing a renaissance of racialized artists. For me, that’s a good thing. »
What criteria?
Alice Ming Wai Jim notes that the category of “ethnic art” has been used to devalue certain practices over others, depending on what constitutes “good or bad art.” “I refuse these categories. » Art, she says, is still adorned with definitions which are very restrictive when the time comes to consider production resulting from a non-Western experience. To artists who did not belong to the Western tradition, it was proposed either to learn to be something other than what they are, by mimicking canons which are not theirs, or to learn to adapt their production depending on what they are supposed to represent in ethnic terms. Two directions that the professor rejects out of hand.
Even today, everything that is outside of this standardized framework appears difficult to see, to consider, she notes. “The criteria that were used against artists who were not white had the effect of making them invisible to history. For decades, people in Quebec have ignored, for example, several important Asian or black artists, simply because they have been placed outside the field of attention. » She mentions the case of the artist Tim Yum Lau, originally from Hong Kong, based in Montreal for decades, winner of numerous grants. Her work, she says, deserves to be better considered.
She told me this again: “A work always has a social and political element of commitment in it. This is the type of work, in any case, that interests me. » Alice Ming Wai Jim smiles as the photographer of the Duty pokes his nose at the end of the corridor.