Bensonhurst, Brooklyn Houses, 2008, from Foreigners in Paradise, © Jane Tam

Just wanted to update you all on some upcoming shows and what I’ve been up to.

This Friday, November 6th, I will be in a two-person exhibition with the talented Shen Wei at Nemo Design Gallery in Portland, Oregon. I will be showing ten photographs from my “Foreigners in Paradise” project.

From the website:
Nemo Design is proud to present the work of acclaimed photographers Shen Wei and Jane Tam in Reflecting China: Gendered Visions from the Diaspora. Reflecting China combines work from Shen Wei’s Chinese Sentiment Series with Jane Tam’s Foreigners in Paradise Series. The result is a collection of work that explores issues of Chinese identity, gender, diaspora, cultural memory, imagined communities, longing and belonging. Both artists have been internationally recognized for their work. Shen is the recipient of many awards and was named as one of fifteen in the “new generation of photo pioneers” by American Photo magazine in 2007 as well as, one of the PDN’s “30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch” in 2008. Jane Tam was awarded with the Emerging Photographer Award at the Pingyao Photography Festival in China.

Reflecting China is part of the community programming for the Portland Art Museum’s China Design Now exhibit.

At the end of this year, I’m taking a trip to Hong Kong to continue my “Asleep At Sea” series. It will be about 2.5 weeks of shooting and I’m so excited for it!

After the new year, I am also showing work at the Fotofest Biennial 2010. The show, “Whatever Was Splendid,” is curated by Aaron Schuman, of Seesaw Magazine and incorporates an amazing roster of artists that I am most humbled to be included with.

From the website:
Aaron Schuman explores the legacy and continued influence of a “thoroughly modern photographic figure,” Walker Evans. “The striking similarities between Evans’s time and our own have become all too clear,” says Mr. Schuman. “Bearing this in mind, I began to investigate his profound influence on how the United States is still responded to, regarded, recognized and represented within photography today.” The artists in Mr. Schuman’s exhibition are: Will Steacy, Michael Schmelling, Greg Stimac, Tema Stauffer, Jason Lazarus, Jane Tam, Richard Mosse, Craig Mammano, Todd Hido, Hank Willis Thomas, and RJ Shaughnessy.

Reflecting China: Gendered Visions from the Diaspora
Two-Person Exhibition with Jane Tam and Shen Wei
Nemo Design Gallery
1875 SE Belmont St.Portland, OR 97214
Nov. 6 – 23, 2009
Opening Reception: Nov. 6, 2009 from 6-10pm

Whatever Was Splendid
Fotofest Biennial 2010, curated by Aaron Schuman
Vine Street Studios
1113 Vine Street
Houston, Texas
March 12 – Apr 25, 2010

Free photographic print, 5×7 on archival inkjet paper, from Asleep at Sea, © Jane Tam

I’m planning to sell a few prints soon to offset costs for finishing my Asleep at Sea project. My trip to Vietnam has been canceled due to unfortunate circumstances but my trip to Hong Kong is still on. Before I finalize which prints to offer for sale, I want to gift a print to a reader.

Please send an email your name and mailing address to jane (at) janetam.com with the subject: weekend print gift.

***The photograph has been requested. Thanks!

Hope the first reader who responds enjoys it!

Lau Fau San Temple, Hong Kong, from Asleep at Sea, © Jane Tam

I’m participating in a fundraiser to help support a project for the Vanderbilt Foundation. If you’re looking to collect art and participate in the fundraiser, be sure to purchase a ticket to the event. Lots of great work there! (See the huge list of photographers below)

Art from the Heart Benefit Fundraiser
Galleries at Calumet Photographic
22 West 22nd St
New York, NY
Thursday, September 10, 2009 – 7:00pm – 10:00pm

Participating artists include:

Joseph Cultice, David X. Prutting, Stephan Schacher, Andrew Frasz, J.p. Samedi, Lauren Fleishman, J. Matthew Riva, Chiun-Kai Shih, Mauricio Quintero, Daemian Smith, Livio Mancini, Jens Umbach, Troy Huechtker, Dawn Blackman, Stephen Mallon, Andrew Cutraro, Al-khabir Richman, Andrea Thompson, Benjamin Lowy, George Del Barrio, Leslie Dela-Vega, Mike McGregor, Emiliano Granado, Patrick Hoelck, Matthew Bogosian, Erin O’Brien, Keith Kliner, Robyn Twomey, Angela Capetta, June Kim, Antoine Verglas, Ian Spanier, Alex Verron, Jackie Neale Chadwick, Daniel Root, Elizabeth Fleming, Art Streiber, Kareem Black, Wesley Mann, Sarah Friedman, David Needleman, Morgan Shortell, Alaric Campbell, Jane Tam, Brian Finke, David Goldman, Augustus Butera, James Ransom, Jazzmine Beaulieu, Yijun Liao, Tony Gayle, Joe Fornabio, Nicole Civita, Adriana Lopetrone, Marc Mcandrews, Fabrice Tombert, Tait Simpson, Matt Salacuse, Donna Ferrato, Brian Bowen Smith, Larry Westler, Anak Navaraj, Ashton Worthington, Matt Slaby, Joe Budd, Danny Wilcox Frazier, Donna Alberico, Peter Stanglmayr

(from the Vanderbilt Foundation)
The Vanderbilt Foundation’s mission is to increase public awareness of critical arts, cultural, and human rights organizations. The Foundation does this by producing commercial-grade photography shoots with the industry‚Äôs most diverse and innovative working creatives. The VRF provides partner organizations renewed publicity through large-scale photography exhibitions, workshops, publications, and the World Wide Web.

This “Art from the Heart” Project is a fundraiser that will support the “Masters” project in Cambodia.

This fall, The Vanderbilt Republic Foundation (VRF), in an unprecedented partnership with Arn Chorn-Pond and Cambodian Living Arts, will devote four weeks to rigorously documenting the lives of these Cambodian performing masters in a manner their stories deserve and with an approach that honors and celebrates their significance in our world. Acclaimed large-format portrait photographer Geroge Del Barrio will lead a unique team of American artists deeply inspired by and connected to Arn and the CLA’s narrative. The team will craft life-sized portraits of the masters, their students, their instruments and the world they inhabit, all at the highest professional standard. They’ll print and present this work at life-size, to fully describe the extreme realities of these survivors‚Äîin traveling exhibitions throughout the world and internet. A higher-education lecture series, based on this body of work, is planned. And in addition, a feature-length, broadcast-quality film of the entire process will be created, focusing on the perspective of the masters as they collaborate with the American team. What will transpire is a beautiful story about the arts renaissance in Cambodia today and with your help we can make this project a reality.

Sara Under the D-Train tracks, Brooklyn, 2009, © Jane Tam

Two of my Aunts in front of an Arch, 1970s, © Tam Family

Somehow the summer seemed to have come and gone and August is already upon us.¬† It’s been a year since I graduated and a year since I’ve worked at my dayjob. I was talking to a friend recently and said it seems as if time speeds up right after you leave school. Reality hits you like a brick. Age is nothing but a number but for some reason, as each year goes by I see and feel how time affects those around me. My youngest cousin is starting college in a month, the health of my parents are on the decline, my once close friends are drifting away as their lives take off, and here I am struggling with goals, projects, life, and happiness.

Self-Portrait in the Kitchen, 2009, © Jane Tam

Turning the camera on myself is quite a¬† challenge since it’s a struggle to show the meaning of the photograph, as well as transform into a performer. I’ve been working on a few self-portraits here and there, not really sure where it’s going but sort of excited with the experimentation. I’m a very self conscious person. It could be due to my mother’s constant nagging and her refusal to have her kids shame her or the family.

This photograph, from my parents’ kitchen, was a test shot among over 100 tests. It’s aesthetically very different from the rest of my photographs on my website and certainly exudes very different emotions. Here’s hoping to working it out.

It’s almost been a month since my grandmother’s passing. This Sunday the family will be making a trip to Cypress Hills Cemetary in Brooklyn to do our offerings for her one month death anniversary. It’s a bit odd and it still feels like she hasn’t left us at all. But one thing my family has noticed is that emotions hit you when you least expect it like the times when we’re making fun of her antics at Atlantic City, of how she yells at my grandfather, how she’d ask if you ate dinner yet 3 times in a row, and all her other little sayings.

 

Eldest Aunt with her friends, © Jane Tam

What makes me sad is a bit selfish but I had so many plans for this summer to spend with her. She was certainly the easiest person I know in my family who can connect with my camera so quickly. I always look back into the few sessions I had with her as some of the strongest images. When I looked back at these photographs of her, I had wished I found photography earlier to photograph my other grandmother, who passed when I was 13.

Nelson Chan (whose work on his family inspires me as well) wrote me a sincere email telling me the story of his best friend feeling jealousy over his family images, after realizing he himself did not photograph his father who passed. Nelson did not realize what the feeling of jealousy was for his photographs until he told me he felt jealousy over my photographs of my grandmother.

 

Hong Kong, © Jane Tam

I have not photographed for 3 months now and since receiving Nelson’s personal email, I am ready to pull through. My grandfather is now looking into learning how to surf the internet, maybe swimming, just got back from Las Vegas, and is planning to go to Hong Kong in the fall. To get through the grieving, you have to connect with the pain to keep going. I’m planning to follow my grandfather to China and experience how he now lives his life without his love. It might happen and it might not, depends on his plans and depends on my financials. But China aside, I shall continue to shoot and make the best out of this summer.

Grandmother at Fort Greene Park, 2007, © Jane Tam

My grandparents on my father’s side of the family were the people who brought so many of my family members from Hong Kong to America in the 1970s and after. My grandmother used most of her savings to immigrate to the states. She helped my mother’s side of the family immigrate to the states in the late 80s and 90s as well. It’s amazing how the Tam family as well as the Yeung family are so indebted to this one woman. My grandmother had a slew of medical problems in the past but somehow her fighting power was always strong and she fought it like a tiger. She traveled to many countries with my grandfather, went parasailing, took photographs and pet a live tiger, went gambling every weekend or day at Atlantic City, and talked back to anybody in her way. She was a stubborn lady with quite a temper but she always knew to treat her grandchildren differently, like many grandparents.

As I’ve written in a few posts before, I’ve been busy with a lot of family issues and it was mainly the fact that in these past two months, I’ve been in and out of the hospital with many family members. We have a large family and even with family politics, we are all very filial and respectful. I can’t say I was particularly close with my Grandmother growing up but in the past 2-3 years of photographing her every few months, I started to develop a bond. It’s sad to realize that our relationship was so short but as least I have a few memories to hold on to. My grandmother passed away last Friday with her whole family by her side. She went peacefully and we all know she’s lived a vibrant and great life. She can now gamble all she wants wherever she may be.

It’s hard to maintain a professional blog without being personal especially since I am very attached to my family project. With all the sorrow and sadness of our loss, I am also happy to invite you all to the Nymphoto shows, one of which opens this Wednesday. Funny how life works; such polar opposites of emotions.

Nymphoto Presents @ Sasha Wolf

A group show exhibiting compelling collection of work by contemporary women photographers from across the globe. While diverse in content, these works convey the complexity of the female gaze – the woman behind the camera. The photographs ignite a spirit by addressing a diversity of issues, which inevitably calls into question: what is feminine.

The exhibit features work by:

Jennifer Boomer, Nina B√ºsing Corvallo, Rona Chang, Livia Corona, Katrina d’Autremont, Jen Davis, Lizzie Gorfaine, Candace Gottschalk, Victoria Hely-Hutchinson, Megan Maloy, Tiana Markova-Gold, Debora Mittelstaedt, Maria Passarotti, Alex Prager, Beatrix Reinhardt, Anna Skladmann, Jane Tam, Malou van Breevoort, Corinne Vionnet, Sophia Wallace, & Susan Worsham

Exhibition opens May 23rd through June 6, 2009.

Please join us for the artist reception May 28, 2009 6-8 p.m. at Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York.

*Psst: We also have an opening reception and book launch on May 6, 2009 at Sasha Wolf Gallery for Nymphoto: Conversations Volume I.