Open Studio with Karen Tam

Join artist Karen Tam, digitally, in the studio to see what she’s been up to while in residence at Griffin Art Projects. Karen Tam is a Montreal-based artist whose research focuses on the various forms of constructions and imaginations of cultures and communities, through her installation work in which she recreates spaces of Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. Throughout her time at Griffin, Tam has worked with local Asian art specialists, collectors and artists, within an artist-as-curator methodology, in order to develop a project about how objects made by non-Western as well as Chinese and Chinese-Canadian artists are collected, how narratives are constructed about these collections and the colonial notions that underwrite some of these relations. Tam lives and works in Montréal and holds a MFA in Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths (University of London). Since 2000, she has exhibited her work and participated in residencies in North America, Europe, and China, including the Deutsche Börse Residency at the Frankfurter Kunstverein (Germany), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal(Canada), and CUE Art Foundation (USA). She was a finalist for the Prix Louis-Comtois in 2017 from the Contemporary Art Galleries Association and the Ville de Montréal, a finalist for the Prix en art actuel from the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec in 2016, and long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2016 and 2010. Her works are in museum, corporate, and private collections in Canada, United States, and United Kingdom.