Ho Tam Fine China
A project spanning more than twenty years, Vancouver-based artist Ho Tam’s Fine China is a mixed-media exploration of China's past and present, with a different take on issues within and outside of a country of growing influence in the present day. It is a search for China's identity in the new millennium.
This exhibition at Paul Petro Contemporary Art presents several iterations of Tam’s project, including a collection of 24 inkjet prints based on re-designed porcelain pieces (fine china), with banal and iconic/ironic images embedded into the original patterning. In his video Fine China (2000; 8:33 mins), Tam transcribes a collection of found and original footage into a display of the original 22 re-designed porcelains that form the basis for the new prints—overlaid with images including panda bears, Jackie Chan, Mao, and the McDonald's logo—engaging humour alongside a thinly veiled political edge. The images are also gathered into the artist’s Hotam Press publications included in the exhibition: Fine China (magazine, 2014), and Fine China (newspaper, 2023), which outwardly echo the appurtenances of mass-media forms of image distribution.
The prints presented within the exhibition include image-captures from the video, as well as newer images such as a repeat patterning of the COVID-19 coronavirus, to further and suggestively reflect the current moment. Retracing personal and collective memories, Fine China provides an alternative perspective on an aging civilization as it reinvents itself into a possible superpower of the future.
Ho Tam (b.1962, Hong Kong) is a Canadian visual artist whose practice spans video, photography, graphic design, painting, and print media, and independent publishing. Tam holds a BA from McMaster University, an MFA from Bard College, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program. His work is often concerned with mass-media representations of race and queer identity politics, and has been screened at film festivals and exhibited in public and alternative galleries across Canada and internationally. Permanent collections include the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and RBC Toronto.
