Interview with Tong Lam on his Nuit Blanche Exhibition: Where There Is No Room for Fiction
Tong Lam, Associate Professor of History in the Department of Historical Studies at UTM, exhibited his project, Where There Is No Room for Fiction, at Toronto's Nuit Blanche this October. Professor Lam's installation examines the connections between our daily consumption and the workers in distant lands that sustain it. We had the opportunity to connect with Professor Lam to hear more about his research project and bringing this installation to life.
Q: You exhibited your research-creation project Where There Is No Room for Fiction at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche last month. I heard from colleagues that the installation was quite large-scale and complex. How was it received? After all, it’s rather uncommon to see a research-creation project featured at Nuit Blanche!
A: It was wonderful to see so many of my colleagues there, many of whom were particularly interested in questions of infrastructure, logistics, and labor, in addition to aesthetics and images. One colleague even brought his entire graduate seminar to view the installation. The equally heartening experience was the engagement from the general public. I was pleasantly surprised by how attentive many visitors were—they carefully read the descriptions, discussed the work among themselves, and, in some cases, even spoke with me directly. I noticed that some stayed for quite a long time.
Previously, I had the impression that most people came to Nuit Blanche mainly for the spectacle. So presenting a research-creation project in a lively venue like Stackt Market was a real challenge. For instance, I was hesitant to include too much text or too many details in the installation. Ultimately, I decided to keep things simple: the entire site, including the official city signage, features only three main texts.
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about this research-creation project? How did you present your findings to the audience?
A: The project documents and analyzes the forced eviction and transformation of an urban neighborhood in Guangzhou, China. The area in question was an urban village, where land was collectively owned by villagers, a legacy of China’s socialist past. Since the 1990s, globalization has propelled postsocialist China into the so-called “factory of the world.” Rapid development and urbanization meant that many rural villages once on the outskirts of cities became engulfed by expanding urban areas. In response, rural landlords often took advantage of the situation, converting farmland into dormitory-style vernacular housing for migrant workers who had come to the city to work in factories and service industries.
Many of these slum-like enclaves have been demolished or redeveloped in recent years, and this one was facing the same fate. However, the village landlords were highly organized and demanded compensation that even some sympathizers regarded as excessive. When the developer and the government attempted to resolve the disagreement through illegal and violent means, it backfired, resulting in a years-long stalemate. I have written about this confrontation in several research articles. To make a long story short, there was no hero in this story: both sides were driven by the logic of capital and greed, while the migrant workers who rented rooms there were helplessly caught in between. As I argue in my research, these urban slums were not accidental but structural. These spaces functioned as the “warehouses” of China’s massive reserve army of migrant workers that fueled its rise as a manufacturing superpower.
I began this project in 2013. In addition to ethnographic observation and interviews, I created photographs by projecting images of everyday life onto the ruins of the village at night, then re-photographing these projections. In a way, using projectors and the camera to make these images was like moving the darkroom outdoors, or using the city itself as a canvas. The idea was that in a world where the urban landscape is already a spectacle produced by state power and capital, fictional images I constructed may be closer to the truth.
In earlier exhibitions, these photographs were displayed in lightboxes, resembling real estate advertisements in China, except that I was advertising what might be called the unreal estate of China’s spectacular and speculative development.
This is just the gist of it, of course. It’s not easy to translate all of this into a few sentences, especially in a different geographical setting where the audience is mostly seeking a moment of excitement!
Q: When you projected these images in Toronto, with the city skyline as the backdrop, it seemed that you were adding even more texture to the story. Can you explain how you translated all this for the Nuit Blanche audience?
A: The theme of this year’s Nuit Blanche was Translating the City. My initial plan was to focus directly on the migrant worker neighborhood. I even hoped to include videos and sounds from the community, including footage of demolitions. But when Stackt Market, Canada’s largest shipping container market, emerged as a possible location for my installation, I decided to set aside most of those specific details. Instead, I used the site to frame the broader living conditions of migrant workers against the larger ideas of globalization and seamless mobility that embodied in the very technology of the shipping container itself.
I overheard some viewers saying that they had never really thought about the significance of shipping containers until seeing the installation. Another visitor mentioned that she often came to Stackt Market but had never realized that the structures were made from actual containers, let alone that they were stacked on top of one another. Several people also commented that the site felt like a perfect fit for the work, which I took as a sign that the core message had resonated.
Q: Your project venue indeed sounds rather unusual. What were the main challenges in mounting an exhibition in a site like that?
A: There were far too many challenges! I was given the most prominent courtyard of the container market — a large, busy, and visually chaotic space. There were shops on the ground level with their own lighting, decorative themes, and products that I had no control over. I therefore needed to create an installation large enough to counter the site’s visual chaos without being swallowed by it, and all within a limited budget.
In contemporary art, site-specific installations are often intended as a critique of the highly sanitized, decontextualized, and commercialized white walls of museums. Interestingly, this container market was itself a space of consumption, and it was also architecturally stunning. In this courtyard, three layers of decommissioned modular containers were stacked playfully, with the top layer striking out in a V-shape. The entire space was therefore at once functional and iconic, mundane and spectacular. The market, by the way, was designed by two architects affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty and has received several architectural awards.
My first challenge was conceptual as well as curatorial, as I sought to integrate these otherwise distracting elements into the installation. Eventually, I created a four-channel multimedia installation that invited viewers to contemplate the relationships between production and consumption, seamless globalization and precarious living conditions, and between shipping containers as mobile warehouses and dormitories as warehouses for invisible labor. Images were projected on different container levels and on the interior wall of a container store, where lightboxes were visible from the storefront to echo the idea of real estate as a commodity. Meanwhile, the screens scattered across the three levels were made of tarps commonly used as construction scaffolds, and some of the texts were printed on similar materials, referencing demolition and the temporary nature of these spaces.
In this way, the entire installation — from the projections to the lightboxes, from the shipping containers to the high-rise condos in the background — added yet another layer of meaning to the original body of work. The venue turned out to be a remarkably productive site to realize this multimedia project.
Finally, there were logistical challenges. The sheer weight and size of the high-capacity projectors used for the outdoor projections was certainly one of them. Neither my assistant nor I had experience with them. So, paradoxically, while the project critically examined global supply chains and the invisible laborers who sustain them, it could not have been realized without the invisible labor of the technicians who tirelessly lifted and lowered the heavy machines onto the container roofs, solved endless wiring problems, and prepared the site as a whole. That paradox, unseen by the audience, added yet another layer of meaning to the work.
