Swallowing Mountains

Karen Tam is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-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 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, He Xiangning Art Museum, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She has received grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts du Québec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Karen 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 Award.

Karen Tam holds an 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 publication Asia Collections outside Asia: Questioning Artefacts, Cultures and Identities in the Museum (2020) edited by Iside Carbone and Helen Wang, and to Alison Hulme’s (ed.) book, The Changing Landscape of China’s Consumerism (2014). Her work is in private, corporate and museum collections in Canada, the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom. She is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau.

This year Karen Tam is preparing the launch of three publications: Whose Chinatown? Examining Chinatown Gazes in Art, Archives, and Collections published by Projects, With wings like clouds hung from the sky co-published by Richmond Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Varley Art Gallery, and SHEEN-wah-ZREE edited by Ariane de Blois, co-published by Plein Sud, Contemporary Art Exhibition Center in Longueuil, and EXPRESSION Exhibition Centre in Saint-Hyacinthe.

The Artist-in-Residence program invites artists to take a critical and conceptual look at the McCord Stewart Museum’s collection, reflecting on the connections between their artistic practice and the objects and stories they uncover during their research. As part of this research-oriented creative activity, artists are encouraged to communicate their own interpretation of the collection and propose new ways of interpreting history in its many forms.