CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/7/2025

Contradictions and complexities in Morris Lum's 'Chinatowns'

Featured image, titled “Golden Happiness Plaza, Calgary” (2015), is from Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaai, Chinese Canadian photographer Morris Lum’s affectionately deadpan documentation of Chinatowns across North America. “Chinatown is Chinese, and it is not,” Lily Cho writes. “It is a place, and it is an idea. It is imagined, and it is deeply and dynamically real. It remains unchanged in that it accommodates constant change while still remaining recognizably Chinatown. Morris Lum’s photographs capture these contradictions and complexities. These photographs do not fossilize Chinatown into a particular time even as they insist upon the endurance of Chinatown as a place.”