Recreating an old-style family restaurant circa-1950s to 1960s using found, fabricated, borrowed furniture, props, photographs, videos, lanterns, videos, plants. The 7-feet tall booths recalls Kelowna's City Park Café during the 1940s. In the back is the Karaoke Room, also known as the "Jasmine Room," decorated with landscape paintings, paper-cutouts, girlie posters, moose antlers, and karaoke videos. Events such as "Artist Trading Cards" sessions, "Pirated Chinese Movie Nights" were held throughout the run of the exhibition
Karen Tam is a Tiohtià:ke/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, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. Since 2000, she has exhibited her work and participated in residencies in North America, Europe, and China, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, He Xiangning Art Museum, and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Most recently, she curated the ‘Whose Chinatown?’ exhibition at Griffin Art Projects in 2021, and had solo exhibitions at the Varley Art Gallery and Campbell River Art Gallery, and was included in Manif d'Art 10: La bienniale de Québec in 2022. She has received grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts du Québec, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Tam was the winner of the Prix Giverny Capital 2021 awarded by the Fondation Giverny pour l'art contemporain, and was a finalist for the 2017 Prix Louis-Comtois, a finalist for the 2016 Prix en art actuel from the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec, and long-listed for the 2010 and 2016 Sobey Art Awards.
Tam holds a MFA in Sculpture (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and a PhD in Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London). She is the Adjunct Curator at Griffin Art Projects, and is a contributor to the Asia Collections outside Asia: Questioning Artefacts, Cultures and Identities in the Museum (2020) publication edited by Iside Carbone and Helen Wang, to Alison Hulme (ed.) book, The Changing Landscape of China's Consumerism (2014) and to John Jung's book, Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurant (2010). Her work is in museum and corporate collections such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Collection Hydro-Québec, Collection Royal Bank of Canada, Microsoft Art Collection, and in private collections in Canada, United States, and United Kingdom.
To learn more about Karen and her current work, visit her website.