Cover to Cover

By making and unmaking books, Ho Tam considers how images circulate in contemporary society.

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The mobiles that float alluringly over the latest iteration of Ho Tam’s survey exhibition, Cover to Cover, seem oddly familiar despite their eclectic range of imagery.

Made from digitally printed cut-outs, they feature numbers and animals – a rabbit, a turtle, an elephant – as well as iconic people like Che Guevara and Queen Elizabeth. There’s even an astronaut.

They dangle from the ceiling of the Victoria Arts Council’s modest new exhibition space, next door to the second-hand emporium, Value Village, wafting in ambient air currents with a certain retro charm, but also posing a question: What’s going on here?

Tam, on a walk-through before the exhibition opening, explains that he developed an interest in paper currency and began collecting imagery from various countries. He played with the pictures, creating collages and writing fable-like stories that he eventually published as a book.

It has since been translated from English into 12 other languages, including German, Arabic and Catalan. Each translation has a different format – including a zine, a stack of cards and a scarf – all displayed in a vitrine in a corner of the gallery. The books and the mobiles, the latter shown here for only the second time, are collectively titled, with no little irony, The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Making the work had its challenges. Tam, who is based in Vancouver, notes that currency has a common visual vernacular, no matter the country of origin. National icons are popular, including flowers and birds. And the bills typically feature powerful men, whether presidents, kings or dictators.

This limited cast of characters put a premium on creativity. In one story, Tam found himself considering patriarchy. “There was a place called harem,” the story begins, “where many men lived together. They were consorts of the queen.”

Cover to Cover, which continues until July 13, is a homecoming, of sorts, for Tam, who taught at the University of Victoria from 2004 to 2011.

As the show's title suggests, the focus is his publications. They are freed from their covers, deconstructed and reconstructed into different formats. Images are often slipped into protective plastic covers and pinned to the wall in orderly grids.

It’s the show’s fourth iteration. Earlier stops included the Platform Centre in Winnipeg and the Richmond Art Gallery in Greater Vancouver. Each time, the show has evolved, mutating and shifting.

Tam, who was born in Hong Kong and came to art after an earlier career, is the publisher of 88Books, an independent press for artist books. He created his first book in 1993, but says he became serious about this part of his art practice eight years ago.

His subjects are diverse. One end of the gallery features photographs of orange-robed Buddhist monks that he shot on vacation in Thailand. Elsewhere, Guys at the Fair offers a fascinating study of the cuddly side of masculinity via photos of men holding stuffed animals at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. Both are examples of what the council's executive director, Kegan McFadden, calls Tam's interest in using the lens as "a tool for categorization."

Tam has had a successful career, with solo shows across Canada. Early on, he participated in the prestigious Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. In 2004, he earned a Master’s degree from Bard College in New York.

His videos have been screened internationally at venues as notable as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. One video, Romances (Threshold), is included in this show. It is partnered with two postcard stories that visitors can take home. The project emerged from Tam's 10-day journey from Pearl Harbour to Esquimalt, B.C., on a military frigate, the HMCS Calgary, as part of the Canadian Forces Artist Program, a residency offered by the Canadian military.

The exhibition ably illustrates the depth of Tam’s conceptual approach and his ability to extract pithy commentary from larger fields of information. This is particularly evident in The Yellow Pages, an A to Z array of image and text on yellow sheets of paper. Many reflect assumptions and stereotypes about Asians. For instance, D is represented as “delicacy” and shows a shark fin sticking out of the water. The work is an offshoot of a satirical video Tam made in the 1990s.

Tam’s interest in how images circulate in contemporary society reflects changing notions about individual privacy and public display. For instance, he transgressed social norms around privacy by secretly photographing the contents of medicine cabinets in other people’s bathrooms for a 2016 series, Curious Cabinets.

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Ho Tam, “Magazines,” 2014

Ho Tam, “Magazines,” 2014

digital prints, installation view at Victoria Arts Council, Victoria, B.C., dimensions variable (photo courtesy of the artist)

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Ho Tam, “Magazines,” 2014

Ho Tam, “Magazines,” 2014

digital prints, detail of installation at Victoria Arts Council, Victoria, B.C., dimensions variable

He focuses on public display in Magazines, a grid of fake magazine covers that incorporate unlikely images from his personal collection. The project, which also exists as a book in which every page is a cover, has ample humour. His version of Good Housekeeping, for instance, features a park hut in a West Coast forest. For Gourmet, it’s a pastoral scene – a deer grazing in a field of flowers.

The most poignant piece in the show, Ghost Image, is also the most personal. Here, Tam uses photographs left by his lover, Kirby, who died of AIDS in the 1990s. Tam thought for a long time about how to incorporate the images respectfully into his art. He eventually decided to turn them into negatives.

The pictures show everyday scenes – friends at a table, a day at the beach – that evoke a sense of intimacy. But they have an odd and jarring appearance. Kirby’s skin assumes various shades of blue and his dark hair becomes an eerie white. These formal qualities distance viewers. And unlike the orderly grids elsewhere in the gallery, their arrangement on the wall seems haphazard. Tam chokes up as he talks about the work, his grief still palpable.

Ghost Image is haunted, to be sure, not only by one man's memories, but by a broader web of metaphors related to how we negotiate love and loss, image and reality. Tam's work, like all art, even that with a narrative or archival impulse, cannot forestall catastrophic reversals. Reality shifts, people die, memories fade. But metaphor lingers, helping us accept the passage of time. ■

Ho Tam: Cover to Cover is on view at the Victoria Arts Council from June 6 to July 13, 2019.

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