Ho Tam A Brief History of Me
In this exhibition, personal photographs of the artist, taken from youth to adulthood, are juxtaposed with notes on historical events to form parallel timelines. In a chronological sequence of 51 letter-sized photographs, the artist traces his evolution from a youth in Hong Kong to a middle-aged man in Vancouver, with each page representing one year in his life. Through the interplay of photography and text, A Brief History of Me explores the implicit and mutual influence between the private/personal and the public/political spheres, and between individual and collective memory.
Ho Tam is a media and visual artist whose practice spans multiple disciplines, including photography, video, painting, and print media. Since 2010, Tam has devoted his time to “Ho Tam Press,” an evolving body of self-published magazines that reexamines past work and experiments with new ideas, often with the recurring themes of identity, migration, and trans-nationalism. A Brief History of Me is also published in this magazine form. Tam is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, Bard College (MFA). Paul Petro Contemporary Art hosted A Portrait of the Photographer, a concise survey exhibition of Tam’s work in all media, in 2015.
Ho Tam (b. Hong Kong) is a media/visual artist who has worked in advertising and community psychiatry. He received a BA from McMaster University and an MFA from Bard College (NY). From 1996 to 1997, he was a participant at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Tam has exhibited in public galleries and alternative spaces across Canada. Over 15 of his experimental film/video works are in circulation. Tam is also the publisher of Hotam Press, an independent press of artist books, and currently runs a bookshop and gallery of the same name. Ho Tam lives in Vancouver, BC and has been exhibiting at Paul Petro Contemporary Art since 2002.