Authored by: Yan Wu, Public Art Curator for the City of Markham.
Nuit Blanche reorganizes urban visibility through suspension rather than transformation, using the contemporary art experience as its operative frame. For a single night, from dusk to dawn, spaces designed for circulation, storage, and efficiency are opened to attention without being functionally altered.
Installed at the Stackt Market during Toronto’s 2025 Nuit Blanche, the multimedia installation Where There Is No Room for Fiction by Tong Lam (an associate professor in U of T‘s Department of History and with funding from the School of Cities) unfolds within this provisional condition. STACKT – an assemblage of shipping containers repurposed as storefronts and public-facing infrastructure – already stages the visual language of global circulation and provisional urbanism. Lam’s project does not intervene in this site by redesigning or reprogramming it. Instead, it treats the site as a ready-made urban context through which questions of mobility, dispossession, and normalization can be reframed.
Night, in this project, is not simply an atmospheric register. It names a working condition under which visibility is produced unevenly and often through transgression. The permissive temporality of Nuit Blanche echoes the circumstances under which Lam’s earlier photographs of urban villages were made: after dark, in spaces under erasure, frequently inaccessible or restricted during the day. In these contexts, night enabled trespass – allowing entry into sealed zones, projection onto ruins, and the documentation of spaces in the midst of demolition. Visibility here is neither neutral nor guaranteed; it is contingent, risky, and provisional.
The final presentation – composed of projections and illuminated lightboxes – depends on darkness to appear at all. Light operates through contrast, emerging against enclosure and shadow. In this sense, the night does not merely host the work; it activates it. Darkness becomes the condition through which images can register, circulate, and briefly hold attention before receding once again into the routines of the city.
Where There Is No Room for Fiction emerges from a body of research developed by Tong Lam over more than a decade, grounded in sustained fieldwork and photographic documentation of urban villages in the Pearl River Delta, most notably Xiancun, Guangzhou. The photographs that form the basis of this project were produced primarily between 2013 and 2019, during a period of intensified redevelopment tied to mega-events, real estate speculation, and shifting regimes of urban governance in the region. This is a highly specific historical and spatial context, shaped by Guangzhou’s role as a manufacturing and migrant hub rather than a generalized condition of urban China.
In Lam’s earlier photo essays, images taken at night appear within extended analytical sequences. Photographs of dormitory-style rental housing, sealed entrances, partially demolished schools, and improvised open spaces are embedded in discussions of land tenure arrangements, migrant tenancy, redevelopment negotiations, and campaign-style state intervention particular to urban villages in southern China. The photographs do not stand alone. They are held in place by surrounding text, where meaning accumulates through proximity, sequence, and contextual depth.
In this mode, figures in the images are rarely individualized, yet they are not abstracted. Their presence is addressed relationally – through position rather than identity – within a described urban condition: renters rather than landowners, residents subject to demolition schedules, occupants navigating informal housing markets. Darkness plays a material role in this work. It marks infrastructural neglect, but it also names the conditions under which access becomes possible, enabling entry into spaces under erasure and documentation during moments of transition.
In the Nuit Blanche installation, this mode of address shifts. Images circulate across projections and lightboxes without image-specific narration. Bodies appear repeatedly, but they are no longer anchored by adjacent explanation. Instead of operating within a discursive chain tied to a particular moment in Guangzhou’s urban transformation, figures are absorbed into a broader visual system composed of containers, storefronts, and infrastructural forms.
What changes is not the subject matter, but the function of the image. Human presence no longer carries analytical weight through narrative proximity; it acquires meaning through structural alignment. Bodies are positioned alongside logistical forms rather than within described circumstances, becoming part of a visual grammar organized around circulation, abstraction, and equivalence across sites.
The shift toward structural alignment becomes more explicit in this iteration through the introduction of two moving image works that extend the project beyond its original geographical and temporal frame. One draws from footage shot at container ports in Dubai and Hong Kong, filmed in daylight under conditions of full access and institutional visibility. The camera moves across vast fields of standardized containers, cranes, and transport corridors, rendering logistics as a highly ordered visual system. Circulation registers through scale, repetition, and synchronization. Human labour is present but largely absorbed into the operation of the port itself.
Placed alongside night-time images of urban villages, this footage establishes a contrast in modes of visibility rather than a narrative progression. Where the earlier photographs were produced through trespass and temporal restriction, the port images emerge from openness and legibility. Yet both are folded into the same analytical frame. In each case, bodies recede in relation to systems of circulation. What differs is not the logic, but the conditions under which it becomes visible.
A second video work – a digital animation depicting housing blocks lifted and repositioned by cranes – extends this logic to the built environment itself. Buildings appear as discrete units, detached from occupants and context, moved and exchanged like cargo. Architecture is rendered fully commensurate with logistics. Housing is no longer a site of dwelling but a transferable asset, subject to the same mechanisms of circulation as containers.
These additions do not introduce new arguments so much as translate existing ones across scale and site. Urban villages in Guangzhou, container ports in Dubai and Hong Kong, and container-based commercial infrastructure in Toronto are not compared or explained in relation to one another. They are aligned. Translation, here, does not move from one language to another; it renders different urban conditions structurally equivalent. What is carried across contexts is not local specificity, but a shared logic of circulation, abstraction, and dispossession.
In this iteration, Lam operates simultaneously as researcher, image-maker, and curator. This convergence is less a question of authorship than of method. Materials drawn from different moments and locations – night-time photographs of urban villages in Guangzhou, daylight footage and animation of container ports in Dubai, animated architectural drawings of prototype buildings from the urban village in question lifted and repositioned by cranes – are positioned to reinforce one another rather than to introduce friction. Site, image, and framing are carefully calibrated so that the work reads as a single analytical proposition.
The experience that results is correspondingly focused. Viewers are not asked to move between competing interpretations or unresolved formal tensions. Instead, they are guided toward recognition: to see how disparate urban conditions can be rendered legible through alignment. Meaning emerges through repetition and resonance rather than narrative accumulation. Images do not exceed the argument they support; they translate it across sites and scales.
Seen this way, Where There Is No Room for Fiction functions productively as research-creation understood as an urban method. Aesthetic elements – projection, illumination, video, and site – are mobilized not to generate formal uncertainty, but to carry analysis into space. The city becomes the medium through which research appears, briefly and contingently. Night does not transform the city. It allows a structure to register, before slipping back into the routines that normally render it invisible.
Note: This iteration of Where There Is No Room for Fiction was presented in Toronto as part of the 2025 edition of Nuit Blanche, organized around the theme Translating the City. Installed at STACKT market, the project was developed in response to both the site and the event framework, with Tong Lam assuming responsibility for artistic production and curatorial framing. The project was made possible by the support of the City of Toronto, the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, and STACKT Market.
Yan Wu is the Public Art Curator for the City of Markham.
