Carter Tam

This project explores the complexities of diasporic identity through the lens of personal and cultural estrangement, particularly examining my experience as a Chinese person raised in Canada. At its heart, the work stages an imagined performative dinner—a reconciliation feast—bringing together estranged familial and cultural selves through symbolic characters representing myself and my mother.

Three central motifs—the tiger, porcelain, and the orange—anchor the narrative. The tiger serves as an icon of both cultural pride and postcolonial consumption. Once hunted as a trophy and commodified within both Eastern and Western contexts, the tiger becomes a metaphor for the fragmented self: distorted by colonial desire, genetic manipulation, and digital reconstruction. It embodies the tensions of heritage—between power and vulnerability, masculinity and queerness, east and west.

The performative garments, designed for a speculative postcolonial world, imagine a queer gathering where community is rebuilt through ritual. Here, the tiger’s body is reconstructed using natural fibres: English wool, Chinese silk, and bamboo—materials tied to geography and ecology. The textile work incorporates heritage craft practices such as embroidery and the cheongsam silhouette, blending traditional Chinese aesthetics with contemporary narrative design.

Porcelain appears as both artifact and debris: a symbol of Chinese cultural heritage scattered through global trade and colonial extraction. Unearthed shards from the Thames become metaphors for fragmentation and the piecing together of lost histories—fragments gathered not for display, but for communion.

The orange functions as an ancestral offering, echoing the tiger’s iconic hue while evoking themes of consumption, ritual, and circularity. It ties the narrative back to food, ceremony, and community—a shared language across cultures and generations.

Ultimately, this work navigates diasporic memory, queer identity, and cultural inheritance. It is a gesture toward healing and reassembly—a postcolonial, post-family communion where brokenness is acknowledged, and beauty is found in the gathering.