Talk

Curator Herb Hoi Chun Tam (MFA 2000 Fine Arts) will give a talk about the perceptions and self-representation of the Chinese American experience. Drawing from the Museum of Chinese in America’s vast image collection which includes family snapshots, 1980s Hong Kong film posters, street photography (from Arnold Genthe’s late 19th century depictions of San Francisco Chinatown to contemporary images of Asian American life by professional and amateur photographers), home movies, and the work of contemporary artists, Tam will contextualize these images with the ways Chinese have been perceived throughout their history in America. The talk will focus on the pictorial background/foreground relationship and the idea that Chinese people have often been seen as two-dimensional backdrops to the main characters of the American narrative.

Herb Tam is the curator and director of exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in NYC. He recently co-curated “Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving,” an exhibition that explored the construction of Chinese American identity through MOCA’s archival materials. In 2012, he curated “America through a Chinese Lens,” which surveyed photographs of America by contemporary artists and non-professional photographers of Chinese descent. Tam was previously the associate curator at Exit Art and the acting associate curator at the Queens Museum of Art. Tam was born in Hong Kong and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied at San Jose State University and earned a masters in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York.