Screening and Conversation: Big Fight In Little Chinatown

Karen Cho (曹嘉伦) is a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker known for her socio-political documentaries. Karen’s first film In the Shadow of Gold Mountain (2004) explored the legacy of the Chinese Head Tax, Exclusion Act and redress movement.

Karen’s other films include the Gemini-Nominated Seeking Refuge (2009) a film on refugees in Canada and Status Quo? The Unfinished Business of Feminism in Canada (2012) that won Best Documentary at the Whistler Film Festival and launched in over 67 community screenings across the country.

Karen’s TV work has touched on subjects like Indigenous health and wellness, Japanese Canadian internment, Quebecois cuisine, Vancouver’s downtown east side, and artist activists around the world. In 2018 Karen was nominated for a Best Directing Canadian Screen Award for her work on CBC’s Interrupt This Program.

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.