Saturday, December 13, 2025, 3 – 5 pm
Reading and Book Launch of 83% Perfect, 2025
Amy Ching-Yan Lam, featuring Jody Chan and Fan Wu
In-person at The Goldfarb Gallery
“Every baby is born with only one nightmare.”
We are excited to invite you to a public reading of Amy Ching-Yan Lam’s publication 83% Perfect, a fable-like bookwork centred around the character OhNo who makes friends with OhYes and OhMaybe. When each character is born, they are delegated one nightmare that they must bear throughout their lives. Lam states, “the story is based on my earliest memories of education and competition, transposed onto the past couple years of institutional complicity, and hypocrisy. Basically, it’s a children’s book about the appeal of compliance and the necessity of solidarity.”
For this performance, Lam invites writers and artists Jody Chan and Fan Wu to join her in reading the entire book. Please join us on Saturday, December 13, 2025, from 3 to 5 pm.
This reading is presented in conjunction with our current exhibition 83% Perfect by Amy Ching-Yan Lam, which questions the ideals of exceptionalism perpetuated by educational systems. Lam uses humour and satire to reveal how educational and art institutions counter their imagined functions to give voice, share space, and be open to all by inversely propelling individualism and exceptionalism.
Amy Lam, 83% Perfect, $24. Design: Rosen Eveleigh.
Jody Chan is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, care worker, and community organizer based in Toronto. They are the author of three books of poetry: sick (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), finalist for the Lambda Literary and Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, and winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry; impact statement (Brick Books, 2024), finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award; and madness belongs to the people (Brick Books, forthcoming 2026).
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. Her practice looks at how dominant social and political orders are naturalized, where they reside, and how they can be understood through intuition and feeling. She frequently works in collaboration with other artists, designers, and writers. She is the author of Property Journal and Baby Book. She has exhibited at Richmond Art Gallery, 2023; Eastside Projects, UK, 2022; Seoul MediaCity Biennale, 2021; SFU Galleries, 2021; Centre Clark, 2019; Truck Gallery, 2018; AKA artist-run centre, 2018; Western Front, 2015; Art Gallery of Ontario,
2013. From 2006 to 2020, she was part of the performance art duo Life of a Craphead.
Fan Wu is an interdisciplinary artist who works with libidinous suppurations and Daoist cosmology. Collective practice is crucial to him, and he’s hosted writing/reading workshops at Art Metropole, Mercer Union, and Gallery TPW. You can read his writing online in Capilano Review, C Magazine, and The Flaherty Seminar.
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