MOCA TALKS: Ho Tam in Conversation with Herb Tam
October 5, 2024, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Can’t attend in person? Register for virtual participation
The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) cordially invites you to an insightful conversation between artist Ho Tam and Herb Tam, MOCA’s Curator and Director of Exhibitions. They will explore Tam’s self-published magazine Hotam, his journey in creating artist books, and his reflections on living in New York during the 1990s.
About Hotam
Hotam is the self-published magazine project of Vancouver-based artist Ho Tam. The magazine format allows Tam, who also works in video and painting, to experiment with themes and aesthetics in an accessible and easily transportable format. With its name emblazoned on the cover’s upper third, Hotam satirizes the confidently literal, generically cheery tone of mainstream magazines with hyper-personal and sometimes cryptic content. Issue 1 from 2014, titled A Brief History of Me, is a sequential timeline of the artist’s life through family snapshots. Yellow Pages (Issue 12) takes the form of obsolete business directories, with social issues relevant to Asian Americans listed and illustrated in alphabetical order. Issue 6 is simply titled Magazines: page after page of popular magazine covers with Tam’s playful and sometimes banal photographs disrupting and mocking the grand self-importance of the titles.
About Ho Tam
Ho Tam (b. 1962) is a Hong Kong-born Canadian visual artist whose practice spans print media, video, photography, painting and drawing. Tam studied at Bard College MFA and the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Programs. His work often concerns mass media representations of race and identity politics. Tam’s video work has received prizes from film and video festivals including the Outstanding Artistic Achievement at OutFest Los Angeles and the Best Documentary at Tel Aviv LGBT+ Film Festival (both for ‘Books of James’, 2006). His visual work has been exhibited in various venues including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Vancouver Art Gallery; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Tai Kwun, Hong Kong; and recently, in the exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at Brooklyn Museum. In the past ten years, Tam has been focusing on his artist publishing practice under the imprint Hotam Press.
