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Exhibition

AMY CHING-YAN LAM WITH HAEAHN WOO KWON

a small but comfy house and maybe a dog

April 22 - June 11, 2023

Above: Amy Ching-Yan Lam and HaeAhn Woo Kwon, "Teapot Bathhouse", 2023 (detail), Courtesy of the artists

Curated by Su-Ying Lee

The title of this exhibition comes from a text, “Me in the Future,” that Amy Ching-Yan Lam wrote at age eleven and put in a time capsule, speculating by the age of twenty-five she’d be married, have a career, and “a small but comfy house and maybe a dog.” Starting from these childhood fantasies of domestic love and financial stability, Lam presents artworks that explore how these dreams function within the wider context of colonial history. With humour and acuity, she examines the relationships between property, family, institutional power and collections, and theft.

A central part of the exhibition is a series of models created by Lam in collaboration with artist HaeAhn Woo Kwon, where they remake toys, domestic materials, and found objects into a fantasy communal home. The imagined dog is represented by the real story of Looty, a Pekingese dog taken from China by British troops at the end of the Second Opium War, told through a book and animation.

Expanding on how collections are formed and accessed, Lam has worked with the Richmond Public Library to bring a selection of items from their Dr. Kwok-Chu Lee Collection into the gallery. In turn, the Richmond Art Gallery participates in a lending program of artworks from their Collection, accessible through the Public Library, over the duration of Lam’s exhibition.

The exhibition’s lending program features artworks from the Gallery’s Didactic and Permanent Collections by artists Diyan Achjadi, Amir Ali Alibhai, Len Gardiner, Judith Gillis, Roy Green, Evan Lee, Laurens Lee, Zshu-Zshu Mark, and Alan Wood.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist book, co-published with UK-based publisher Book Works, in 2024.

Biographies

Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She makes exhibitions, performances, and public artworks. She was part of the duo Life of a Craphead from 2006 to 2020. Lam has presented work at Eastside Projects, Seoul MediaCity Biennale, the Western Front, Centre Clark, and numerous other venues, and has participated in residencies at Macdowell and Delfina Foundation. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Baby Book, is forthcoming from Brick Books in April 2023. She was born in Hong Kong and lives in Toronto, which is Mississauga Anishinaabeg treaty territory.

Amylam.me

HaeAhn Woo Kwon is an installation artist. Informed by vernacular architecture in the urban environment of South Korea, her practice recombines and transforms disparate objects and means of production, reflecting on the availability of excess goods and the necessity of inventiveness in our current moment. She often collaborates with Paul Kajander as Haeahn Paul Kwon Kajander. She is an Assistant Professor in NSCAD University and represented by Franz Kaka Gallery in Tkaronto. She lives in Kjipuktuk, known as Halifax.

haeahnpaulkwonkajander.info

Su-Ying Lee is an independent curator living in Toronto/Tkaronto/Taranton/Gichi Kiiwenging, Canada. She has also worked in institutions as Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), Curator in Residence at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, and Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of Mississauga. She received a Masters Degree in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto and is an alumnus of the Toronto Arts Council/Banff Centre’s Cultural Leaders’ Lab. Her projects have taken place across Canada, in Hong Kong, Mexico City and Quezon City (Metro Manila), Philippines where she co-curated the third Kamias Triennial (2020).

Above: Amy Ching-Yan Lam and HaeAhn Woo Kwon, "Teapot Bathhouse", 2023 (detail), Courtesy of the artists

Publication

Property Journal



‘Around this time last year, I had a birthday astrology reading where the reader said they could tell, just by looking at my chart, that I had run away from home when I was seventeen. They said that this year would be a revisiting of that event, but it would happen in a completely different way.’

From December 2021 to December 2022, artist and writer Amy Ching-Yan Lam kept a record of each time real estate, property or housing came up in conversation. She called this the Property Journal.

Over the course of a year, neighbourhood landmarks are demolished, politicians break promises, friends despair, and parents age. Mould appears to grow on Lam’s face moisturiser; as property organises people’s lives, it also overtakes them. What began as a simple framework soon becomes an index of precarity, told through the indignities, dread, and dreamscapes of what we’re able to call ‘home’.

Tender, fierce, and mordantly funny, Property Journal is a damning indictment of the permanent state of affairs known as the housing crisis.

Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, Baby Book (2023, Brick Books), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry, and Looty Goes to Heaven (2022, Eastside Projects). From 2006 to 2020 she was in the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and was born in Hong Kong.

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Audio Recordings

     Narrated in Mandarin by Rebecca Wang 王晨釔 / 國語語音導覽由王晨釔提供
     Narrated in English by danielle wensley

Hours

Sunday 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Monday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Tuesday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Wednesday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Thursday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Friday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Saturday 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM

Closed on statutory holidays.

Current Exhibitions

Admission

By donation

Location

Richmond Cultural Centre
7700 Minoru Gate
Richmond, BC  V6Y 1R8
Canada Line Station: Richmond-Brighouse

604-247-8363
gallery@richmond.ca

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