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Jennifer Tam is a contemporary artist who is influenced by the Peking Opera. She said in the interview I conducted with her, that the Peking Opera intermarries the visual arts with the performing arts and in being Chinese she feels very attracted and inspired by the Opera. Tam thinks that the Peking Opera carries a lot of symbolic weight in its visual elements; for example, the color and the patters in the mask and the makeup they wear. It signifies the personalities of their characters, and the costumes denote specific social ranks and the role of their characters. However, drawing from the Peking Opera allows her to find out more about her own heritage. Sometimes she feels that having left the “ motherland” at such a young age has left her semiautobiographical narratives lacking in concepts from the daily life of the Chinese culture.
Tam says semiautobiographical because she paints about issues that are not just important to her, but relevant in the larger scheme of things. The artist has been exploring issues of being Asian, such as inter-Asian racism, political relations between the East and West, and stereotypes of Asians. She feels that these issues are becoming increasingly relevant with all the attention directed at East Asia with the rapid rise of China as an economic power, the issues with Korea, and the strange but fascinating pop culture of Japan.
Tam is a prolific artists, but one of her paintings titled Dumped has a profound meaning. This painting relays the short story from the Ming era about a wealthy woman whose family has a history of low social standing. She marries a poor but reputable scholar, who then tries to murder her by tossing her overboard one night into a lake. In order to remarry into a family, that is just as wealthy but with greater social status. The woman survives somehow and is adopted into such a family who plays match maker between her and her former husband. She makes her former husband feel sorry for this action and eventually they make up. This painting basically conveys a story about murder, revenge, and ultimately reconciliation. Tam says that she is subconsciously drawn to this story because she had just undergone a similar ordeal in her personal life, but without revenge or reconciliation, although she definitely desires both of these to happen.
Tam painted two other paintings about this woman’s rebirth or the transformation. One painting takes place in a sort of overcast setting while the second one takes place in daytime. “Dumped” was painted as a night scene because for Tam night symbolized death, the death of her old identity. The second painting is about how she is being rescued or reborn, and in the last one, she has completely risen again. The artist says that these paintings were featured at Galerie Myrtis in a show called Emergence. Tam’s second painting which is called “The Lady Who Was A Beggar” was also on the cover of Baltimore’s City Paper.
Jennifer Tam, Hounds of Hell, 2010,
Tam has always been drawn to work that is equal parts craft and concept. By that she means she is attracted to work that has a high degree or just the right amount of craftsmanship and technical finesse, but which is informed by a strong conceptual idea. She says work that is too heavy on either end just does not speak to her. The artists who have been influencing her most lately are James Jean, Easo Andrews, Taskashi Murakami, Hokusai, and Rimpa school of Japanese art. There are countless other artists who she look at and admires, but nothing to do with her work.
More often, she comes away with a feeling of inspiration for her own work or drives to make art, rather than an emotional reaction. She likes to think this because she is more guided in her day to day life by logic than emotion and that is why she is not particularly drawn to things like Abstract Expressionism and German Expressionism. She always finds herself evaluating the craft of the works and being drawn to the emotion they convey, so the ideas she come away with have to do with craft. For example, the Rimpa School influenced the use of gold leaf in the most recent of her painting.
Tam loves James Jean’s work. In our interview she said that seven years ago, she spent hours and hours going through every single thing Jean had done. It was the first time Tam had seen Jean’s work online. Unfortunately Jean’s work and is not widely exhibited. However, Tam is completely enraptured and inspired by Jean, and he had such a strong effect on her that Jean fueled her to create more work.
Review by Sabbu Sunar
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