Image: McMaster Museum of Art, Toronto
‘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 runs from August 25 to December 4, 2026, and is curated by Yan Wu.
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, depicting restaurants, storefronts, places of worship, association halls, interiors, streetscapes and community spaces suspended between presence and absence. 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.
The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Markham Public Art and the Varley Art Gallery of Markham.
Lum is a Toronto-based photographer and artist whose work explores the hybrid identities of the Chinese Canadian community and the transformation of Chinatowns across North America through photography, documentary practices and archival materials. In 2025, he published ‘Tong Yan Gaai | Chinatowns’, a collection of photographs documenting Chinatowns in North America over more than a decade.
