Karen Tam | No MSG at Friendship Dinner
September 15 to October 11
Opening September 15 at 7p

Karen Tam investigates how North American Chinese restaurants represent China and Chinese culture. The daughter of restaurateurs, Tam has been collaborating and working with her own family researching Chinese immigrant experiences, the localization of Chinese culture, and discussing racism and otherness. Tam's installations recreate Chinese restaurant environments, employing typical elements of décor and signage. She proposes to engage members of Halifax's Chinese community, collecting some of their stories and drawing on their skills in the realization of this exhibition.

Tam has been artist-in residence at the Khyber since mid-August, thanks to funding from the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism and Culture. 

No MSG at Friendship Dinner

In North America, food plays a key role in the construction of cultural identity and often the restaurant becomes a site for the formulation of concepts about race. When we choose to eat Italian, for example, or Indian, or Thai, nationality serves as a reference base for a given set of characteristics such as ambiance, flavours and preparation methods that influence the decision-making process. In order to meet patrons' expectations for an "authentic" ethnic dining experience, the restaurateur creates a setting that emphasizes recognizable signifiers of traditional culture filtered through the mechanism of established North American dining practice. What emerges is a cultural simulacrum - a distortion of the original based on artifice and cliché, presented and received as authentic.

No MSG at Friendship Dinner continues Karen Tam's Restaurant Aux Sept Bonheurs series which uses her family's business in Montreal as the basis for exploring the Chinese presence in North America. The exhibit expands on themes initiated in previous installations where manipulation of the material features of the Chinese restaurant helped locate it within an urban sociocultural geography. Here the artist deepens earlier inquries into the Chinese restaurant's function as a public forum for the enactment of social anxieties around Sino-Asian other-ness. Do vestigial fears of the "yellow peril" still exist in modern society and if so, does the Chinese Restaurant serve as a physical space for playing out those phobias? How does the development of a pseudo-Chinese "ethnic cuisine" signal a general dilution of Chinese culture in North America? What role has the Chinese community played in its own dys-Orientation?

In the late 1960's anecdotal reports of allergic reactions to meals prepared in North American Chinese restaurants began to circulate and the term Chinese Restaurant Syndrome gained currency as a description of the group of symptoms associated with consumption of the food additive Monosodium Glutamate. Despite the fact that the substance was and continued to be used in many other non-Asian foods produced in the western world, the cultural association persisted. In 2001, rumours that traced the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease to waste from a Chinese Restaurant became so widespread in the U.K. that the Agriculture Minister made official statements to discredit them. More recently, public reaction to the SARS epidemic in Canada prompted our Prime Minister to appear before the media dining out in Toronto's Chinatown in order to allay public fears about contagion. These incidents offer an opportunity to investigate the Chinese restaurant as a perceived locus of virulence within the larger social body.

Tam posits the relationship between North America and its Chinese subcultures as one of dis-ease by exposing the ironies inherent in the cultural clichés of her own formative environment. She sees the Chinese restaurant as "a metaphor for an imaginary China, imagined by the West and as a place recreated by the Chinese in the West." This approach gestures towards ideas put forward by Edward Said, whose book, Orientalism analyzed the misrepresentation of middle eastern culture in the western world as symptomatic of a need to project undesirable elements of one's own society onto the east. By recreating the interior of a Chinese eating establishment in an art gallery and adapting the installation to incorporate specifically local features, the artist foregrounds the element of theatre at play in the relationship between proprietor and public. Viewers enters a replica of a facsimile where conflicting sensations of familiarity and estrangement intensify their awareness of the distortions, presented and received, that mediate Western perceptions of Chinese tradition. Traces of a colonial-based exoticism emerge as a mix of fascination and phobia that colours the social optic. At the same time, the exhibit's insular atmosphere reinforces the idea of cultural quarantine as a means of taming or containing the overly exotic.

Within the faux restaurant, objects take on a heightened symbolic value rooted in a nostalgia for something that never existed. Huge balloon-shaped fabric lanterns and red paper dragons hang from the ceilings and the windows are draped with bamboo-patterned tulle curtains. Visitors may select their own "fortunes" from a glass jar containing messages ranging from those found in standard, mass-produced fortune cookies to excerpts from poems scrawled on the walls at San Francisco's Angel Island Barracks by Chinese detainees in the early 20th century: "My mind is chaotic, like hemp fibres with constant thought of home; Each meal is hard to swallow, because of sorrow." A laminated mock-up of a generic Chinese restaurant menu itemizes various westernized dishes and discusses the adaptive/assimilative strategy behind their development while incorporating various racial slurs like "rice picker" and "dog muncher" into the text. Intricate red paper cutouts made by the artist and mounted on the walls depict traditional Chinese imagery inlaid with racist symbols like swastikas; the resulting figurative disjuncture effects an interrogation of the forces behind anti-Chinese sentiment in the West and the appropriation of traditional calligraphic stylizations by those same sociopolitical agents.

In one corner of the installation a monitor displays a continuous loop of video documents, many featuring Tam's father preparing various menu items. In another part of the gallery a second monitor shows clips of Mary (Ling) Mohammed, Jia Tsu (Chai Chu) Thompson, and Greg Fong, members of Halifax's Chinese community, cooking and talking about their restaurant experiences. These works express the film-maker's impulse to record the hands-on preparation of hybrid foods like egg rolls, plum sauce and almond cookies - methods that are being lost as more factory-produced products take over the market - despite the fact that they are a product of the same culinary miscegenation that the artist critiques.

No MSG at Friendship Dinner invites the viewer to question the idea of authenticity itself and to consider the Chinese diaspora as a cultural phenomenon that resulted in a creative adaptation to unfavourable circumstances. And is that all bad? Can diasporic cultures be considered just as authentic as the mother culture? And is the hybridization of cultural norms not a realistic evolution, a making something new? As a child born in Canada to first-generation Chinese parents, Tam's attitude towards her bi-cultural heritage ranges from bemused detachment to a subversive indignation towards the historical and cultural forces that continue to shape the Chinese profile on the North American continent. The act of deconstructing and reconstructing the Chinese restaurant signifies both a ritualistic re-claiming of culture and a political intervention into the social processes that determine popular ideologies involving time, place, and race.

- Peggy MacKinnon