1er July is not a holiday for Chinese Canadians. Canada Day has even been synonymous for decades with a “day of humiliation”. Cause it’s a 1er July, 1923, the Chinese Immigration Act was born. It was added to the entry tax imposed on this fringe of new arrivals, already a victim, before the start of the 20th century.e century, of hostilities of the type ” White Canada Forever a common slogan in British Columbia.
One hundred years after the establishment of the “Chinese Exclusion Act”, abolished in 1947, the artist Karen Tam does not unearth it with avenging rage. It wouldn’t match his calm, laughing, deeply lovable personality. His exhibition swallow the mountainsat the McCord Stewart Museum, has an opposite agenda: unifying, nostalgic and, yes, optimistically forward-looking.
“With the pandemic [consécutive à un virus apparu à Wuhan, en Chine], people of Asian descent have experienced racism. This birthday [de la loi] allows us to remember that a hundred years ago, something similar happened,” she said, during an interview with a tasty cocktail of French and English. In reaction to this racial policy, which will have had the effect, among other things, of limiting female immigration, the artist wanted to tell another story and “promote the contribution of Chinese women in Montreal”.
Karen Tam is the ninth artist invited by the Montreal museum to mount an exhibition from its collections. Initiated in 2012, the Artist in Residence program concludes once again on the third floor. The space is identical, the content unique. An observation: it is not only the McCord reserves that are represented, those of several families as well.
“I arrived with the intention of looking for anything that might seem Chinese, and then offer what I couldn’t find”, says the one whose exhibition, as it has done for twenty years, subtly mixes decorative or utilitarian artefacts and personal works. A noble objective guides her: to fight the public under-representation of the Sino-Montreal reality.
The daughter of parents who arrived in Quebec after Canada had established a point system in 1967 to evaluate candidates for immigration — and remove racial criteria — Karen Tam carries within her, or in her work, the story of a once banished community, often confined to the exotic and ultimately unrecognized. The creator of installations imitating Chinese restaurants, karaoke bars, shops, private lounges and photo studios has built her new exhibition around the question of image and identity. are added studio portraits, family photos and a set of memories that reveal the richness of a vernacular, filial heritage, transmitted from one generation to the next.
Chinese shadow
Between the Cantonese opera offered in the background and the design of the menu of the China Garden café reproduced in wallpaper, swallow the mountains offers a multitude of elements of Chinese culture as they have survived in spite of the challenges… or the mountains of migration. The enlargement of the view of Chinatown which opens the route is revealing. The black and white photograph from 1965, acquired by the McCord in the 1980s, testifies to the need to tell what the official speeches do not tell.
About the colored arch painted by an anonymous hand in the image, Karen Tam suggests that it corresponds to the “desire to beautify Chinatown “. She herself added some and superimposed Chinese shadows, cut out on a floating cardboard. A fan gives the whole thing an animated movie feel.
“It’s a fictional scene from the fictional opera that I would like to write, she confides. A completely different project. I have the title [Le parcours d’une héroïne à travers des territoires hostiles], I have my character… I am ambitious: it will be an opera in Chinese shadows, but perhaps an installation first. »
The doctor from the prestigious Goldsmiths University in London seems to be driven by endless curiosity. And passionate about what she discovers. Her favorite part of the residency at the McCord? The albums of six families acquired by the museum in 2004, at the heart of an exhibition, Memories from herethree years later.
But it is a historical figure photographed by the famous Notman studio who amazes him: Edith Maude Eaton, alias Sui Sin Far (1865-1914), writer and journalist born of a Sino-British marriage. “She and her sister Winnifred were the first female Asian writers in North America. Edith wrote in the Montreal Star on the Chinese community”, says the artist.
Karen Tam hopes that her exhibition, which recounts more than 100 years of Chinese presence in Montreal, does useful work: eradicate racism. Yes, she admits, since 2020, deplorable acts have been committed, not towards her, but towards acquaintances. To the point where she no longer dared to go out. “I asked my boyfriend to come with me. In his presence, he, a white man, I felt safe, ”she says, not without laughing.