Brooklyn-based author, writer, and artist Amy Ching-Yan Lam’s solo exhibition 83% Perfect is currently being featured at York’s Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery. The multi-modal installation includes a story written on bright orange paper posted on corkboards across two different rooms, a series of staircases, and a short film on political activism. Through her work, Lam explores concepts of academic perfection, institutional barriers, childhood memories, and nightmares.
The written story follows OhNo, a character who embodies Lam’s first encounter with failure in an institutional setting as a three-year-old, sowing her tendency to overachieve. Receiving an 83 per cent is close to perfect but not quite, and Lam’s work hinges on this sense of good-but-not-good-enough as OhNo is examined as a child through a slew of standardized tests.
The book of the same title, available for browsing and purchase at the Goldfarb Gallery, has its pages plastered on walls throughout the exhibit.
The memory of Lam’s first assessment, aptly titled First Test, is captured through an arrangement of 15 green staircases that vary in size, shape, and orientation.
“One of my first and most formative memories of childhood — of performing the physical test of walking up the green stairs — became a natural focal point,” Lam recounts. “That memory is made physical in the installation First Test, and also retold and fictionalized in the story, 83% Perfect, that spans the exhibition.”
“When I was invited to make an exhibition for the Goldfarb Gallery and seeing its location on York campus, I immediately knew that I wanted to think about systems of education. Throughout my life, a lot of pressure and value was placed on excelling at school,” Lam reflects. Claiming this pressure as part of the “cliché immigrant experience,” she “wanted to think about how this pressure to succeed changes from childhood to adulthood, and how it manifests in different ways.”
Acceptable Protest, a short film on loop at the gallery made with Emerson Maxwell, connects activism with the concept of academic failure and institutional pressure through a 17-minute animation. The film lists the do’s and don’ts of acceptable and peaceful protest on university grounds and demonstrates the absurdity of such rules through satire and humour. Lam says that the film “is about campus protest, but you can also apply most of the things that the professor or university administrator characters say in the video to any other field where, above all, the number one value is maintaining your own professional standing.”
“As I was working on the show, Israel’s genocide in Gaza began,” Lam elaborates. “I saw people around me — friends and colleagues — remain silent or complicit in order to maintain their professional success. I also participated in Palestine solidarity organizing in the art and literature world, and felt the disjunct between the urgency of that and the complacency or reluctance of most people. So the exhibition became not only about childhood notions of achievement, but also about the excuses that people make to justify trading ethics for their careers.”
The exhibit will be featured at the Goldfarb Gallery until Jan. 31, and includes the opportunity to purchase the 83% Perfect book for $24.00. Learn more about Amy Ching-Yan Lam here.
