Karen Tam — Sea of Clouds

Montreal-based artist makes “playful, transformative, subversive art”

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To call Karen Tam a copycat would not insult the Montreal-based artist; she might even embrace the term. Sea of Clouds lays out a display of objects that are her DIY imitations of precious things and cultural symbols that she makes from ordinary materials she finds at hand. Then she leaves you to discover their surprises and delights. 

Tam’s versions of precious green jades are fashioned from Irish Spring soap, her delicate silver trays are cutout and embossed pizza pans, her exquisite porcelains are papier mâché made from Chinese newspapers. Tam is not a copycat of the Western ilk; a Chinese idea of the copy is, paradoxically, what gives her work its strikingly original force. 

The framework of Sea of Clouds, Tam’s large exhibition-cum-installation at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery is the North American world’s fair, but its animating spirit is the playful energy of a Chinese concept called shanzhai.

The term has gone through changes of meaning over time. In the 10th century, it literally meant “mountain fortress,” the kind that robber bandits holed up in.

In contemporary China, shanzhai refers to the copycat counterculture, a uniquely Chinese phenomenon that began with copying DVDs, MP3 players and cellphones — a counterfeit Apple iPhone became a Hi Phone — and has since spread to permeate ordinary people’s lives in everything from ramen noodles to TV shows. 

Where culture is high and official, shanzhai is low and outside control. Where luxury goods are exclusive and priced out of sight, shanzhai is adaptive and accessible to ordinary folk. Shanzhai is grassroots, creative, innovative, and irreverent: a natural vehicle for humorous parody. Tam’s shanzhai artworks are, she says, “copying with a twist.” The Western art terms appropriation plus deconstruction come close to this, but in shanzhai, the deconstruction is built in. 

In her installation there are some actual souvenir items and knockoffs in the mix, but most objects here were made by Tam. And she is inimitable.

Visitors to Sea of Clouds enter through a gateway like the ones at the entrances to the Chinese villages at world’s fairs and contemporary Chinatowns. Popular in North American cities at the turn of the 19th century, world’s fairs dominated by colonial powers showcased the industry, science and culture of nations. Using this framework, Tam claims the art gallery as a physical and conceptual cultural space that mimics aspects of both fair and Chinatown, as signifiers of China for Western audiences have hardly changed. In Tam’s installation, they are piled on in abundance. 

Tam manifests ideas in things, their forms and the materials she uses to make them. In Sea of Clouds, which includes work from 2008 to 2024, tradition rubs up against contemporary life, available materials take on the forms of traditional or precious objects. Just as every “copy” implicates an “original,” everything in the installation has a double meaning.

If the array seems exhaustive, it also functions as a survey of Tam’s preoccupations since 2008. Everything in her work is connected. A self-described research nerd, she digs deeply into the history of Chinese people in North America, how they were/are represented, who has represented them, and how they have been seen and received, for better and worse. 

Along with the architectural mock-ups of gateway and pleasure boat, Sea of Clouds contains a dragon boat, opium den screens, a model pavilion, a bridge, a Double Happiness symbol, and model pagodas, two of which were made by children in a Jesuit orphanage in China. There are embroidered banners and flags, Chinese brush paintings, felt floral displays, fans, souvenir cufflinks, appliqued satin wall hangings, faux lacquer trays, menu holders, napkin rings, coins, and more. Two videos refer to entertainments. One called A Heroine’s Journey Through Hostile Territories (2023) combines Cantonese opera with Chinese shadow puppet theatre. The other shows historical footage of acrobats performing at the Chinese Exhibit at Vancouver’s Golden Jubilee in 1936. 

Tam’s version of a fine porcelain 100 Butterfly vase is the witty and wonderful One Hundred Moths (2015), a papier-mâché bottle vase with its long neck aslant and its body covered by Chinese varieties of the insects that get a bad rap. A take-off on Tang Dynasty ceramic tomb sculptures of horses and camels from the golden age of Chinese sculpture appears as a row of large pinatas based on the same quadrupeds. Tang sculptures were made for the deceased’s use in the afterlife to transport people and goods, while pinatas are for parties, often on birthdays, and are meant to be destroyed to release a cascade of hidden treats. 

Tam relates paper pinatas, which were apparently invented in China, to the Chinese funerary custom of burning paper replicas of things for the afterlife (like a Mercedes Benz) and trumps ritual consumerism in death with a celebration of the cycles of life in which destruction releases joy and brings solace to grief. She conflates jade burial suits made for ancient Han Dynasty aristocrats with Tlingit body armour that incorporated Chinese coins gotten in trade to make Coin-Suit (2021), literally heavy armour she has made from imitation Chinese coins. Coin-Suit honours (and protects) early North American immigrants who suffered hardship and discrimination because of their otherness. 

The theme of the Silk Road, the ancient and modern networks of land and marine trade routes that have connected East and West for centuries, weaves through the installation. It’s a recurring metaphor for the exchange of goods and ideas that culminates in the tour de force in Sea of Clouds. An intricate swirling flow of imagery, From Yiwu to You (2015-2024) is a major work that’s shown here as a completed work for the first time. The blue-and-white installation-within-an-installation covers four walls in a reference to rooms in wealthy European homes covered in Delft tiles. Dutch Delftware, by the way, is an imitation of Chinese porcelain. 

Tam’s version is a network of cyanotype-paper hexagons, exposed in the sun, that forms a long paper mural whose themes are travel, trade, mythology, consumerism and economic and political.  Its movement, which begins in medias res, is from East to West, beginning on the China-Pakistan or Karakoram Highway to Yiwu, the largest small commodities marketplace in China, to the Pacific Ocean, and Canada. Along the way a viewer encounters a mythical woman warrior, a wind farm, a desert, an ocean submersible, and a highspeed train, images that point to ancient routes and allude to China’s assertive ambitions for a New Silk Road in two-way trade. 

At-hand materials and a DIY aesthetic are nothing new in contemporary art. The genius of shanzhai practice lies in its marriage of creativity and subversion; Tam’s brilliance is to bring shanzhai out of the world of commodities and into her playful, transformative, subversive art. ■

Karen Tam, Sea of Clouds, is on view now through Nov. 23 at Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta University of the Arts, Calgary

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