Join artist Amy Ching-Yan Lam and guests Andrea Actis, Ido Radon, and Christian Vistan for the launch of Lam’s new poetry book, Baby Book.

Direct and humorous, Baby Book stacks story upon story to explore how beliefs are first formed. From a discount bus tour family vacation to a cosmogony based on cheese, these poems accumulate around principles of contingency and revelation. Lam describes the vivid tactility of growth and death–how everything is constantly, painfully remade–offering a vision against the stuck narratives of property and inheritance. Power is located in the senses, in wind: multiple and restless.

This launch is presented by READ Books and the Richmond Art Gallery on the occasion of Amy Ching-Yan Lam’s exhibition, a small but comfy house and maybe a dog, at the Richmond Art Gallery on view April 22 – June 11, 2023.

Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of Looty Goes to Heaven (2022) and her poems have been published by Book Works, Montez Press, and yolkless press. Baby Book is her first collection of poetry. Lam’s exhibitions, performances, and public artworks, both solo and as part of the collective Life of a Craphead, have been presented at Seoul MediaCity Biennale, Eastside Projects, and Art Gallery of Ontario, amongst others, and she has participated in residencies at Macdowell and Delfina Foundation. She lives in Toronto, which is Mississauga Anishinaabeg treaty territory, as well as the land of the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat. Lam was born in Hong Kong.

Andrea Actis was born in Toronto but for most of her life has lived in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She teaches literature and creative writing at Capilano University, edited The Capilano Review from 2015-17, and has had poetry and criticism published in Fence, World Picture Journal, Pelt, and elsewhere. Her first book, Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021), is an autoconceptual study of traumatic grief, white working-class identity, false prophets, and whole seriousness. Her book in progress, Flowers on Inner Memory, instead discloses a long process of anticipatory grief—of consciously preparing for contact with death and about creating the personal, political, and spiritual conditions necessary for doing death beautifully. It is also much more explicitly about aliens. With Trevor Shikaze, Andrea operates WAWI (What Are We In?), a small press supporting experiencers of the anomalous who want to write and writers who want to take seriously their anomalous experiences.

Ido Radon is an artist and writer thinking through the overlapping zones of radical histories and discourses, histories of digital technologies, feminisms, and science/speculative fiction's project of “engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present." (Eshun). Solo exhibitions include those at Artspeak (Vancouver, B.C), Air de Paris (Paris), Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR), Et al. (San Francisco), Jupiter Woods (London), Pied-à-terre (San Francisco), Romance (Pittsburgh), and Veronica (Seattle). Her work has been shown at RONGWRONG (Amsterdam), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle).

Her work has been published in journals including E.A.A.P.E.S., RULER, and Ecocore, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs. Among her artist books are AGE OF SAND, Wholeness Engine, The Blind Remembrance of the Swirling Bone, INFINITY INCREASER, The Plumb and the Wave, Prototyping Utopias, The Book of Knots, and most recently, the zine SOCIETY, produced for the exhibition of the same name at Veronica.

Radon is an autodidact who holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia.

Christian Vistan is an artist originally from the peninsula now known as Bataan, Philippines, living and working on Musqueam, Squamish, Tsawwassen and Tsleil-Waututh territories, colonially known as Vancouver and Ladner, British Columbia. In their artworks, they translate experiences of distance and diaspora into hybrid forms that fold together various elements, including memory, place, poetry, and abstraction among others. They are particularly interested in thinking about and working with water as a material in painting and in personal, familial and migrant histories. They make paintings and texts, and curate exhibitions, often collaborating with other artists, writers, and curators. They received their BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2017. In 2020, they started dreams comma delta, a former bedroom turned gallery space for artist projects and exhibitions located inside their family home in Ladner. They run and co-curate dreams with Aubin Soo K.