The
Pacific Islands have played home to many talented artists and Diana Tam is one
of these. Her studio/gallery in Port Vila, Vanuatu provides the visitor with an
opportunity to encounter a world at once passionate and sensuous - a world of
colour, energy and creativity. Painting, for Tam is not merely a passing pleasure but a daily activity - a compulsion which is essential to her sense of self. Her formal training at the Queensland Art Society and under artist David Fowler has been comprehensive and traditional, giving her a great command of both the painted surface and her medium which continues to be predominantly oils on canvas. Central to her oeuvre are the play of intense colour and concerns of beauty.
Tam’s work is predominantly non-figurative and includes landscapes, beach scenes and still life. As art theorist Nicholas Bourriaurd states: “The artists dwells in the circumstances the present offers him, so as to turn the setting of his life (his links with the physical and conceptual world) into a lasting world” (14). So too, Tam’s paintings document her world as she draws inspiration from her multicultural background to provide us with scenes from her adopted homes of Vanuatu, Australia, China and her birthplace Hong Kong. However, her images are not merely a travelogue, nor are they simply a memento of place.
Conceptually, Tam searches not so much for the formal quality of the relationship between subject and object, but rather for the affect that that object or place has on the viewer: that is to say that her painting exists more for the atmospherics of place rather than for place itself. This is most evident in her Vanuatu works where she is concerned to capture the almost Edenic qualities of her environment. This is not to suggest that her painting presents an escapist idyll but rather that it acts as a celebration of life.
This sense of affect is heightened by Tam’s palette. Her artistic language is governed by the passionate use of vibrant colour to produce images of optical splendour no where more evident than in Banana Bay and the underwater vista Calm Sea. In Joie de Vie Tam sets up a play between interior and exterior worlds to create a tension between the containment and intensity of Europeanised space (the impressionistic image of the vase of flowers) and the supposed freedom of the natural world (the window glimpse of the water and her Pacific island home).
In Big Wave (157x180), a large triptych (which speaks back to that great Japanese print artist Hokusai), Tam uses the darker tones of her blue palette to capture the depth and grandeur of the ocean. By focussing on the surging power of the momentary but individual wave, she captures not just the beauty but also the sense of threat that such a wave brings with it. In Big Curl Tam captures that quintessential moment before the wave crashes: but it is the play of intense light across the top of the picture plane that produces a sense of spectacle.
Whilst Tam’s artistic oeuvre is firmly anchored to European traditions, her stylistic approach is also redolent of the great traditions of Chinese landscape painting which, (from as early as the fourteenth century) using a more impressionistic approach to representation, explored the spiritual and emotional elements associated with the landscape. As with these highly stylised images, Tam’s work also exhibits a contained sense of dynamism and energy. In Fuchun (China), Diana presents the mystical presence of the rural Chinese landscape.
In the twentieth century, the theories of modernism and postmodernism promoted the abandonment of ideas of beauty which were not associated with Kantian precepts of the sublime. These theories proposed idealised notions of beauty which were “pure, godlike” and “outside normal experience” and reduced pictorial representation to the merely charming or ornamental. At the beginning of the twenty first century, artists and art critics are once again re-evaluating the nature of aesthetic experience and as they do, they now give the artistic re-enactment of beauty a new legitimacy. Within this context, Tam’s unashamedly beautiful, and sometimes humorous images constitute a joyous celebration of life.
With the image Crepe Ginger, the sheer size of the painting (2meters x 1.5 metres) shifts the dynamic form of representation from that of mere replication to the concept of the monumental, giving the floral image dramatic presence. Given that our awareness of space is calculated in relation to the body, this staged theatricality of the image changes the relationship of the viewing subject with the painted image. Here, the evocative nature of the painting’s dramatic presence causes a sense of physical distancing to objectify not the image, but the viewing subject.
Yet, painting is not the limit of Tam’s creative prowess. Like some of the world’s greatest artists such as Picasso, who designed and painted pottery as consumables, Raoul Dufy who designed stationary for dress designer Poiret, and of course Andy Warhol who saw art as a commercial activity rather than as labour, Diana has throughout her artistic career produced art and design in an applied form. This is not to detract from her artistic ability but rather shows her versatility and depth of talent.
As with Ken Done, Tam works “openly and unselfconsciously” in the areas of jewellery design and manufacture, fabric and dress design and also has developed a range of home wares. Although Tam sees these products as secondary to her painting, they are original, of high quality and have a personalised dimension. In 2005 she worked with APCO paints as a consultant for the refurbishment of the Port Vila international Airport. Lime green, turquoise, yellow, purple were mixed to create an illusion of the sea and sky to produce a welcoming affect that she identifies as being essential to the experience of Vanuatu.
Tam’s works are held in private collections across the world. She has held numerous highly successful solo exhibitions, in Australia, in New York and in Hong Kong. Her exhibition Colour and Harmony: My World at the Weber Gallery 2001 was highly successful and was made notable by an interview on Radio Hong Kong where she spoke about her life and work in Vanuatu. There, she has been honoured by receiving a rare invitation (for a non French citizen) to exhibit her work in the French Embassy. In 2006 she was commissioned by the le Lagon Hotel in Port Vila, at the time of its refurbishment, to provide a suite paintings and prints for the hotel.
Tam has never been afraid to experiment with art and art forms and inspiration for her fabric painting and wearable art forms may be sheeted home to her familiarity with Chinese painting on silk.
When speaking of her work Diana states: “I feel that the paintings that I am doing now have a lot of energy in them, and I am more confidant in expressing myself in an abstract way. It is difficult to push that one step further from where I am, as I paint the local scenes for my visitors to the gallery and need to create a lot of my original wears in the gallery. I only like to sell items that have a quality and a personal touch. There is not much in my gallery that has not been personalized by me and this is what my visitors want”.
The work of Diana Tam provides us with a dynamic amalgam of cross-cultural elements and influences as it continues to engage us with both its sensual beauty and vibrancy.
Dr Christine Dauber
Ph D. BA. BA Honours (Art History), University of Queensland
Dr Dauber lives and works as a university lecturer and independent art critic in Brisbane, Australia.