Icons Redux: Ho Tam

Opening Friday, March 28, 7pm

Looping back three decades to a seminal suite of under-seen paintings by the Vancouver-based visual artist and publisher.

Ho Tam is a Canadian visual artist whose practice spans video, photography, graphic design, painting and print media. His work has been exhibited in public and alternative galleries across Canada and internationally. As part of his art practice, Tam edits and publishes artist's books.

A Brief Backward & Foreward

Deborah de Boer: Ho, please tell me what your circumstances were when you initiated the Icons series in 1993?

Ho Tam: Leading up to 1993, I was only doing painting and drawing. I had been focusing on portraits and sometimes architecture and cityscapes, in small to medium formats. At that point, I was beginning to feel more ambitious and wanted to expand the size of my paintings and also extend my portraits from painting heads to fuller figures. The idea just came to me that I would do a series of Asian men.

My partner Kirby was then diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and he was quite out and active in the community. I thought that I could use my painting to explore or to illustrate the crisis experienced by Asian gay men. The beginning of the project probably came from the two works '+' and ‘-‘ two nine canvas grids. (one is incomplete with only one panel remaining, the others lost to time and transit).

I have always been interested in graphics and commercial advertising. I wanted to combine some food labels with the figures. Painting itself and painting Asian men were not very popular at the time. I was trying to make a point about the exotic nature of my subject matter by matching the figures with food products. There was also a saying by Mencius: “Food and sex are human nature.” I took that as a cue.

The portraits were meant to be depicting a state of confusion and desperation. I introduced the food labels to create some ambiguity and perhaps humour. Humour is very important to me in my work—maybe as a tactic to entice and provoke viewers into giving it more thought. The world or the depicted situation is not always pleasant and sometimes we just have to laugh (for lack of a better word here) about it. Humour, for me, is a neutralizer when trying to talk about more serious and taboo topics.

DdB: From the perspective of three decades, how do you see (or not see) the impetus of the crisis you have mentioned in this work. Crises evolve. I wonder if they are also mutable. What are your current responses to Icons given the evolution of your own life, work and interests?

HT: My partner passed away in 1995 and I felt a part of me also went away. My attention turned to dealing with grief, and to moving on, as many people advised me. I rolled the canvases up and stored them away about 20 years ago. After the first few showings, I did not find more opportunities for exhibition. Since then I have not given them too much thought primarily because I have not seen the work in real life for years.

Now I see Icons as a very important part of my life. It is an essential link in the evolution of me as an artist and as a person. I had so much energy then and thought that art could change the world. These are things that I wish to still have within me. Technically I think the work could be improved and I am a bit embarrassed by the paintings but I was working fast and my ideas came very fast too. They were honest and sincere. Somehow I am also surprised that they have not aged so much. They are still relevant to me (and hopefully others) today.

I have always been a very private person and do not want to talk about myself, especially in my art. In the past, I tended to use others as stand-ins when I wanted to tell my stories. Part of the reason was probably that it was too painful and personal to open myself up. In my work I eventually followed different paths and I went on to explore other topics and mediums. Not that I feel I need to dissociate from my past but these days my concerns and attention are directed elsewhere.

As time moves on, I am able to disclose more. As I age, I feel more remote to my younger self, or to the past. I am still interested in the idea of representing or representation. My commitment to respond to rising crises continues to resurface. For example, a few years ago I was very disturbed by what went on in Hong Kong politically and I made a lot of work about the situation. Current international affairs and the varying crisis facing Canada are very much on my mind these days. I have no doubt that they will become something I want to explore in my work soon.

DdB: I love that you use the words “honesty” and “sincerity” since they are powerful and important words and concepts that seem eclipsed by many recent trends, subsumed wholesale by advertising and capitalism in general. I have been considering your slight technical embarrassment in regards to revisiting Icons and my own responses when I first saw these images. They were, and remain, so powerful and immediate to me, walking a tightrope between vulnerability, shyness and something indomitable as well as glorious. I think about the work in storage for twenty years, for the reasons you elucidate as well as the power of revisiting things. Do images and objects accrue power when they are out of sight, overlooked or forgotten once they revealed after significant time has passed? How did your early work involving portraiture influence or integrate itself into your evolving practice of bookwork and publishing? How is an exhibition different than a book in revealing things?

HT: I stored away the paintings like putting away part of my past. I opened them up again but didn’t know if I was ready to discuss it or to reconcile with it. Maybe everyone has to deal with their past eventually. I believe that the paintings still retain a certain power. The world and I have not changed very much even though some time has passed. For the last twenty years I was busy with other things. My interest in portraiture still remains and some of my bookwork and publishing deals with it. Sometimes my exploration seems to get more personal and singular. And then at other times it is more general and divisive. There is definitely a continuation of focus about the storytelling and the narrative in my work. And often it is autobiographical.

I am glad that you are interested in showing Icons, and in its most complete forms as possible. It will be good to pick up where the project was left off, a continuation. A few friends have become interested and intrigued by the work.

When I moved into the bookwork and publishing realm, I was very attracted to the economy of the book form in the telling of stories. In an exhibition, the work is somewhat limited to a duration, a space, a budget, etc. I think of the bookwork as a transportable show that can be get into many hands. It is just as satisfying. I have always liked the process in the making, whether a painting or the creation of a book.

"+" and "-" were shown at A Space (Toronto) in a group exhibition "Dismantling Invisibility: Asian and Pacific Islander Artists Respond to the AIDS Crisis" in 1993, Icons as a solo exhibition at Observatoire 4 (Montreal) in 1994, and YYZ Artists’ Outlet, (Toronto) and White Water Gallery (North Bay) in 1995.