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. Hong Kong) is a media/visual artist who has worked in advertising and community psychiatry. He received a BA from McMaster University and an MFA from Bard College (NY). From 1996 to 1997, he was a participant at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Tam has exhibited in public galleries and alternative spaces across Canada. Over 15 of his experimental film/video works are in circulation. Tam is also the publisher of Hotam Press, an independent press of artist books, and currently runs a bookshop and gallery of the same name. Ho Tam lives in Vancouver, BC and has been exhibiting at Paul Petro Contemporary Art since 2002.
