Interior Chinatown: Morris Lum | 林耀基在華埠 is the artist’s first institutional mid-career survey, bringing together works from a photographic practice spanning more than a decade with newly commissioned pieces. The exhibition turns to Chinatown not only as the subject of Morris Lum’s photographs, but as the cultural, spatial, and social framework through which his practice can be understood.

Lum’s images are often quiet, carefully composed, and almost uninhabited. Restaurants, storefronts, places of worship, association halls, interiors, streetscapes, and community spaces appear suspended between presence and absence. Yet their stillness is not empty. Each image is shaped by access, trust, repetition, and care: by the time required to enter these spaces, return to them, and understand how they hold memory, labour, belief, commerce, and belonging. What Lum documents is therefore not simply Chinatown as it appears, but Chinatown as he has come to know it.

The exhibition title centres the artist while placing him “in Chinatown.” Lum himself is largely absent from the images, but his position is everywhere implied: in the choice of sites, the patience of the frame, the attention to interiors, and the relationships that make the photographs possible. Chinatown becomes less a backdrop than a condition of practice: a way of seeing, but also a way of being seen through one’s belonging, obligations, and communities.

Bringing together works made across many cities and sites, the exhibition allows Lum’s Chinatowns and Chinatown-like formations to appear in relation to one another for the first time in a single institutional survey. Historic neighbourhoods, suburban commercial interiors, temples, restaurants, community organizations, martial arts practice, and archival research are not assembled as a complete map. They form a layered interior: a show within a show, where Chinatown is continually emerging, inhabited, revised, and contested.

The exhibition also acknowledges Lum’s broader community and advocacy work, including initiatives connected to the preservation and reimagining of Chinatown. Through photographs, research materials, new commissions, and community-based work, Interior Chinatown: Morris Lum | 林耀基在華埠 asks how Chinatown has shaped Lum’s practice, and how his practice asks us to look again at Chinatown.

This exhibition is produced in collaboration with Markham Public Art and the Varley Art Gallery of Markham.

Exhibition Dates: August 25, 2026 to December 4, 2026

Exhibition Reception: Thursday, September 17, 2026, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. (remarks at 6 p.m.)

Mahjong at the Museum: Thursday, October 8, 12:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Learn more and register here.

Artist and Curator Talk with Morris Lum and Yan Wu: Saturday, October 24th, 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. No registration required.

Join artist Morris Lum and curator Yan Wu for a guided tour and conversation through Interior Chinatown: Morris Lum | 林耀基在華埠. Together, they will discuss the development of the exhibition, Lum’s ongoing engagement with Chinatowns and Chinese diaspora communities, and the stories, encounters, and research behind the works on view. Moving through the exhibition, the conversation will offer insight into both the artist’s practice and the curatorial thinking that shaped the project. 

Exhibition Guide for Interior Chinatown: Morris Lum | 林耀基在華埠

Morris Lum 林耀基, (b. 1983, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Toronto-based photographer and artist whose work explores the hybrid identities of the Chinese Canadian community focusing on the transformation of Chinatowns across North America through photography, documentary practices and engaging with archival materials. In 2025 Lum published Tong Yan Gaai | Chinatowns photographs by Morris Lum a collection of photographs spanning over a decade documenting Chinatowns in North America.

Lum’s work has been exhibited and screened across Canada, and the United States and has received numerous accolades including CONTACT Photography Festival Burtynsky Grant (2023) and the A&E Short Filmmakers Award (2010). Lum holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) and is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.

Yan Wu is an independent curator, translator, and writer based in Toronto. Her work focuses on the intersection of contemporary art, architecture, and urban habitats, alongside a sustained engagement with conceptual art, translation, and translingual cultural practices. She is currently Public Art Curator for the City of Markham and is pursuing a PhD at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.

Her recent curatorial and collaborative projects include Tom Dean: GOOD-BYE at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (2025); Between Leaf and Light by Scott Rogers at the Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre Cancer Centre (2025); Lost and Found by Holly Ward and Kevin Schmidt (2023–24) and Double Gazebo by Native Art Department International (2022), both at the Varley Art Gallery of Markham; and Miao Ying: A Field Guide to Ideology at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2022).

Wu has co-translated into Chinese Passages in Modern Sculpture by Rosalind Krauss, Six Years by Lucy Lippard, Rock My Religion by Dan Graham, Formless by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, and Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel by John Cage. She also authored the Chinese text for M+’s online exhibition Marcel Duchamp: Lessons for a Creative Life from Box in a Valise. Her writing has appeared in Artforum.cn, ArtReview Asia, Canadian Art, PUBLIC, and e-flux Criticism.

Born and raised in Shanghai, Wu moved to Canada in 2001 and is now based in Toronto.

Image Credit

Morris Lum (Canadian, b. Trinidad, 1983)
Gate of Harmonious Interest, Victoria, 2023
photographic print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag® Bright White Paper using Epson archival inks
40 x 50 inches
Museum of Art Collection Trust, 2026

The artist acknowledges the support of: