Learning How to Be Chinese

Caught between parents who could not see owning an art gallery as a respectable or worthwhile endeavor and the West’s view of Chinese Contemporary art as derivative, Pearl Lam has travelled the globe looking for a venue for her vision of Chinese Contemporary culture.  She’s finally found it in Hong Kong, according to the Financial Times:

She returned to her family with a dream of opening a gallery. “It was not acceptable. They didn’t approve of me studying abroad for 10 years only to become a shopkeeper. We have no tradition of galleries in China and they didn’t understand. I was sent to Shanghai to help on a property development project. My parents thought I was too wild and needed calming down. But I negotiated the possibility of doing some pop-up shows.”

The young Chinese artists whom Lam met in Shanghai in the early 1990s had a life-changing influence. “They were talking about Confucius, Daoism, Buddhism,” she recalls. “I was amazed, it seemed so old fashioned; I thought of contemporary art in terms of western street culture. But of course, this kind of discussion had been banned during the Cultural Revolution and to talk about these things was subversive and cool. No one was reading this material in Hong Kong. I learnt how to be Chinese.”