In Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaai, artist and photographer Morris Lum turns his lens toward the disappearing Chinatowns of North America, mapping them through more than a decade of sustained attention. The result, published in October 2025, is both a historical archive and an emotional cartography—an attempt to hold on to spaces that have always been impermanent. While the photographs themselves are quiet, their collective force is immense: Lum’s work documents what is being erased while questioning what “preservation” really means. By exploring and assessing the project’s aesthetic, cultural, and political significance, we can in turn explore its merits and limitations within the larger context of documentary photography, urban change, and diasporic identity.
Context: A Disappearing World
To understand Lum’s project, one must begin with the state of Chinatowns themselves. Once centers of immigrant life, labor, and culture, North America’s Chinatowns have become contested sites of redevelopment and gentrification. In cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, and New York, the original working-class Chinese enclaves are being processed out by high-end real estate and tourism-driven economies. What remains is often a curated fragment of the past—a Chinatown that exists as a symbol rather than community. As the National Trust for Historic Preservation notes in “Why We’re Protecting America’s Chinatowns,” these neighborhoods stand “at the front lines of cultural preservation,” where redevelopment pressures threaten to erase working-class immigrant heritage altogether.
Lum’s background makes him uniquely positioned to engage with this subject. Born in Trinidad and based in Toronto, he is part of the Chinese diaspora but also an outsider to many of the specific communities he documents. This double position, both within and without, allows him to move through these spaces as an observer attuned to questions of belonging and estrangement. For Lum, the camera becomes not just a documentary tool, but also a means of cultural translation: it mediates between memory and disappearance, presence and absence.
For over more than a decade, Lum has visited Chinatowns across the continent, photographing not only their iconic gateways and bustling markets but also their back alleys, shuttered stores, and hybrid architectures. These are not the postcard versions of Chinatown with glowing neon signs—his work resists nostalgia and spectacle, choosing instead to see Chinatown as a living, changing organism. This perspective echoes the argument made by Preservation Magazine in “How Chinatowns Nationwide Are Finding Ways to Thrive Into the Future,” which stresses that Chinatowns must be understood as evolving, community-driven ecosystems rather than static heritage sites.
The Book as Archive
Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaai collects Lum’s photographs alongside essays, maps, and interviews that trace the historical and personal dimensions of the project. Designed as a hybrid between an art book and an ethnographic record, the volume invites readers to move between image and text in order to read Chinatown as both visual landscape and social document.
In Cantonese, “Tong Yan Gaai” means “Street of the Chinese People.” This title is crucial: it reframes Chinatown not as an exotic district within the Western city, but as a street where Chinese lives unfold. The use of transliteration signals Lum’s refusal to translate the community into purely Western visual terms. His book, then, becomes a bridge between languages and histories, insisting that these spaces cannot be flattened into tourist attractions or cultural clichés.
The book’s sequencing is one of its strongest achievements. It moves geographically, but also emotionally, alternating between dense urban scenes and quiet architectural studies. One spread might show the chaotic signage of Manhattan’s Canal Street, while the next isolates a fading building in Vancouver. Through this rhythm, Lum builds a sense of accumulation—the idea that Chinatown is not one place but a constellation of parallel worlds.
Visual Language and Aesthetic Strategy
Lum’s photography belongs to the documentary tradition but also pushes against it. He often works with a large-format camera, producing images that are rich in architectural detail. His compositions are balanced and still, avoiding the dramatization that characterizes much street photography. By eliminating spectacle, he invites the viewer to look longer, to notice the layers of signage, brick, and reflection that mark these spaces.
One of the most compelling images in Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaai depicts a narrow street in New York’s Chinatown, captured in the early morning light. The storefronts line a quiet alley where the colorful zigzag mural on the asphalt injects vibrancy into an otherwise subdued scene. The shutters are drawn, their metallic surfaces graffitied and worn. Above, fire escapes crisscross the façades, suggesting both vulnerability and endurance. Lum’s framing here is deliberate: the viewer’s eyes are led down the curve of Doyers Street toward the sunlit brick at the end, as if following a path into memory. The image conveys the layered histories of these immigrant-built environments. Even in stillness, the photograph hums with traces of human life, with signs of labor, care, and adaptation etched into every surface.
Another image shifts the viewer indoors, into what appears to be the meeting hall of a benevolent association. The room is warmly lit, adorned with red lanterns, calligraphy scrolls, and framed photographs of gatherings that spanned decades. The long marble-topped table in the center gleams beneath fluorescent light, its surface clean but well used. The symmetry of the composition—the chairs neatly aligned, the decoration balanced along the ceiling—creates a sense of reverence. Yet Lum’s attention to detail invites us beyond mere documentation: the slightly uneven garlands, the dated clock, the mix of traditional and modern materials evoke a community that persists through adaptation. This is not a museum piece, but a living archive. The photograph embodies continuity—how rituals, aesthetics, and spaces of belonging are maintained even as their contexts shift around them.
Lum’s restrained style echoes the typology-based approaches of photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher, yet his emotional undercurrent distinguishes him. Where the Bechers cataloged industrial structures with detached precision, Lum’s catalog is personal and elegiac. His repetition of storefronts and façades accumulates into a meditation on fragility.
Color also plays a subtle but vital role. Unlike the hyper-saturated red often associated with Chinatown imagery, Lum’s palette leans toward muted tones like grays, browns, and faded blues. This tonality communicates the erosion of the once vivid surfaces, suggesting both literal and metaphorical fading. It’s a refusal of stereotype: Lum does not exoticize. Instead, he offers a patient way of seeing that values endurance over spectacle.
Chinatown as Living Archive
The real strength of Tong Yan Gaai lies in how it redefines Chinatowns as a living archive. Rather than treating Chinatown as a static cultural relic, Lum reveals it as a dynamic intersection of past and present. His photographs show how old symbols coexist with new economies. This dynamic aligns with Di Gao’s recent argument in “Sustaining the Ecosystem that Gives Life to Chinatown,” which emphasizes that true preservation means supporting the social, cultural, and economic networks that keep Chinatowns alive, not just preserving façades.
This coexistence raises crucial questions about authenticity and change. What does it mean for a place built by working-class immigrants to now be curated for tourists and developers? Lum does not answer directly, but his photographs invite reflection. They depict how signage, architecture, and daily rhythms embody cultural negotiation. Chinatown, in Lum’s lens, is not lost—it is continually being rewritten.
In interviews, Lum has explained that his project began as a personal attempt to find connection with his heritage but evolved into something larger: a meditation on the collective experience of migration. This evolution mirrors the broader trajectory of diaspora studies in contemporary art, where personal memory intersects with systemic critique. Lum’s Chinatowns therefore participates in an important cultural conversation: who gets to define the meaning of “home” when home itself keeps moving?
Merits: Context, Precision, and Empathy
Lum’s project succeeds on several fronts. Contextually, it fills a significant gap in both art and urban documentation. While many photographers have captured the aesthetic charm of Chinatown, few have addressed its structural vulnerability by examining how economic forces erode it from within. Lum’s photographs function as visual evidence of transformation: the closed restaurants, converted lofts, and half-preserved temples all testify to ongoing displacement.
Formally, Lum’s precision gives his work credibility and weight. His compositions are studied but never stiff, allowing small human presences—a figure walking past a shop, a hand-painted sign, a reflection in glass—to soften the geometry. This attention to subtle detail makes his archive both analytical and emotional.
But perhaps Lum’s greatest merit is empathy. He photographs with care, avoiding exploitation or sentimentality. His work honors the people who have built and maintained these neighborhoods without turning them into symbols. In this sense, Lum achieves a delicate balance between documentation and advocacy. His images quietly advocate for remembrance, asking viewers to slow down and look more deeply at what is fading before their eyes.
Shortcomings: Stillness and Distance
Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaai is not without its limitations. The very stillness that defines Lum’s style can also create emotional distance. Because many of his photographs exclude people, the human stories risk becoming abstracted. The viewer is left to infer the lives behind the doors and windows, which may reinforce the sense of Chinatown as a site of disappearance rather than continuity.
Another challenge lies in accessibility. The book’s format—large, minimalist, and heavily designed—caters to the art world more than to the communities it depicts. While the inclusion of essays and maps provides context, the project sometimes feels more like an academic artifact than a tool of community engagement. One wonders what it might mean for these images to return to the people whose histories they preserve, perhaps through exhibitions within Chinatowns themselves or collaborative projects that invite local participation.
In addition, much of Lum’s geographic breadth occasionally comes at the expense of depth. By spanning so many cities, the project risks flattening their differences. San Francisco’s century-old enclave, Toronto’s postwar immigrant corridor, and Vancouver’s rapidly redeveloping district each have unique histories. The cumulative view is powerful, but a more sustained engagement with one or two sites might have revealed the deeper rhythms of daily life.
Comparative Context
Situating Lum’s work within the broader field of photography underscores both its innovation and its lineage. His contemporaries include photographers like Wing Young Huie, whose portraits of everyday life in Midwestern immigrant communities foreground the human face of diversity, and Edward Burtynsky, whose large-scale images of industry and landscape examine human impact with formal precision. Lum’s project sits between these poles—human-centered yet architecturally meticulous. Unlike Burtynsky, who often captures monumental transformations from a distance, Lum works at street level. His photographs are not about spectacle but about proximity. Unlike Huie, who frequently includes posed portraits, Lum emphasizes the traces of presence—the afterimage of human activity. This combination of intimacy and absence defines his aesthetic contribution: a documentary mode that mourns without dramatizing.
In Canadian art history, Lum also converses with figures like Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, who used urban photography to question the politics of representation. Yet Lum departs from their conceptual detachment. His photographs may be formally rigorous, but they carry a different emotional temperature: warmth, care, and a sense of cultural responsibility.
The Role of the Artist Today
To assess Lum’s work is to also ask about the role of the artist in our current moment. What does it mean to document communities under threat? Can photography intervene in systems of displacement, or does it merely record loss?
Lum’s approach suggests that documentation itself can be an act of resistance. By making visible what might otherwise vanish, he creates a counter-archive that resists the erasure of cultural memory. In a world where redevelopment often rewrites the urban landscape overnight, his photographs serve as witness. They remind us that visibility is a form of power—that to photograph a place with care is to assess its worth.
At the same time, Lum’s restraint prevents the work from becoming overtly political. He avoids slogans or moralizing statements, allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions. This subtlety is both strength and limitation: it ensures longevity and complexity, but it may not provoke immediate action.
What We Gain by Looking Closely
Ultimately, the value of Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaai lies in what it teaches us about attention. To look at Lum’s photographs is to practice a kind of visual mindfulness—to recognize how layers of architecture and signage embody centuries of migration, labor, and adaptation. The slow pace of his imagery contrasts with the speed of gentrification, reminding us that preservation begins with noticing. Through this quiet persistence, Lum transforms documentary photography into an ethical practice. He asks not only what we see, but how we see, and who we choose to see. His Chinatown is neither museum nor ruin, but a complex ecosystem of memory and survival.
A Work of Enduring Relevance
Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaai stands as one of the most significant photographic projects of the past year, both for its aesthetic rigor and its cultural resonance. It extends the tradition of socially engaged photography while offering a model of empathy and patience rarely found in contemporary visual culture.
Its merits—the depth of research, the sensitivity of its vision, and the insistence on slowness—far outweigh its minor shortcomings. Even where it falters in accessibility or emotional immediacy, it compensates through its long-term value as an archive.
In an era of rapid urban erasure, Lum’s work performs a vital task: it remembers. It preserves what official histories neglect: the everyday architectures of belonging that shape diasporic life. For readers and viewers, the recommendation is clear: Chinatowns: Tong Yan Gaai is not just a book to admire but a document to study, a mirror through which we might better understand the fragile, enduring fabric of our shared cities.