Works by Morris Lum
Curated by Sherry Chunqing Liu
Toronto-based artist Morris Lum has been photographing Chinatowns across North America for nearly ten years, developing a personal as well as collective archive of these community-embedded landscapes. The works in this exhibition, spanning different times and geographic areas, focus on Chinese restaurants that have disappeared over the years. They unearth the stories and labour behind Chinese restaurants as gathering spaces and a cultural signifier integral for community building. Lum’s artistic labour gestures against the forgetting of local stories of labour, made invisible due to the gentrification of the city and the never-ending transformation of our urban landscape.
This exhibition was a part of The Centre Cannot Hold: Labourious Memories, which I co-curated with Erin Storus and Atif Mikhail Khan at The Jackman Humanities Institute, Toronto.
Curatorial Text: Those Unforgotten
Photo credits: Toni Hafkenscheid, Nicole Cartier Barrera, and the Art Museum