As a member of the Chinese diaspora, Lam has been accustomed to dealing with, experiencing and observing cultural miscommunications. Her preoccupation with preserving and documenting cultural practices that are often lost in translation, and through generational shifts, began in 2014 when her parents had to shut down a branch of Choy’s Garden, a branch of the original Chinese restaurant, Bamboo Garden, that her grandmother opened in the Sixties when she emigrated to Sweden from Hong Kong, via the UK. Choy was Lam’s grandmother’s maternal last name, and the artist spent a large part of her childhood in that particular branch, which was run by her aunt and uncle. “I basically lived in that Chinese restaurant my whole life, and when they decided to sell the restaurant, it was like something sparked in me. I had this urge to document the space.” 

Lam used 3D laser technology to scan and print objects, furniture and general decor from the restaurant, as well as from other Chinese eateries around Sweden.

“I had this utopian idea of a machine being the perfect tool to scan something spatially,” the artist says, noting the irony in using advanced technology to preserve old memories. The urgency to document other spaces in Sweden significant or representative of the Chinese—and specifically Cantonese—community there was twofold for Lam. One was, of course, personal, a way of holding on to her family’s legacy. The other was to preserve and uphold the disappearing mementos of the heritage of immigrants. While the initial immigrant generation’s priority was survival, that of subsequent ones was to thrive; they also have the freedom to indulge in nostalgia. As Lam explains, “Even though I was brought up in this environment of a Chinese restaurant, I’ve never felt the burden to make that business work.”

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Charting the spaces resulted in a collection of opaque, white, distorted versions of objects—chairs, tables, vases—with a haunted, ghost-like quality to them, which to Lam resembled the sentiment she was trying to define: the fragmented and imperfect nature of memory. “A lot of the times what you are holding on to just doesn’t exist any more,” says Lam. “It’s a memory, and memories are subjective and glitchy.” The sculptures were put together to compose Phantom Banquet (2019-20), an installation often exhibited against a black backdrop and which formed an almost eerie replica of an old restaurant, evoking memories of the past and waning traditions which may soon cease to exist. “Looking at [the material] made me think about the image of a memory fading away, or like a shipwreck or something that has been burnt with traces from a fire.” 

As an artist, it was important for Lam that these characteristics were reflected in the materials. “It [loss] mirrors itself in the materials, and in ideas of how language moved from one space or one culture to another,” Lam says. “It’s the same way how the [Sea Palace] dragon lost its meaning, from being seen as a protective and auspicious to something demonic.” In highlighting and playing with the sometimes polarising differences between western/Scandinavian and Chinese cultures, Lam harnesses the challenge of depicting and living with both. 

In Tales of the Altersea, Lam unearths a lesser-known connection between Sweden and China, and uses the trajectory of the Sea Palace to illuminate the impact of a historical trade route between the two countries. Gothenburg was an important 18th-century port which received many goods exported from China. That time saw the advent of chinoiserie, a popular European design trend in the 17th and 18th centuries that reflected East Asian and “oriental” motifs. Like Lam’s family restaurant, the Sea Palace had furniture and decor typically found in Chinese restaurants abroad, which has very much been the result of catering to the western perspective on Asia, and making Asian—and in this case, specifically Chinese— culture “palatable” for the west.

Lam plays on this common immigrant practice and incorporates chinoiserie-inspired motifs into the setting of the Tales of the Altersea. She also drew from the idea of ombre chinois, the French name given to Chinese shadow puppetry, and incorporates shadow-play and puppetry in the film, which adds to the work’s mystical, fairytale-like aesthetic. For instance, the aforementioned twin girls, who were separated at birth and swim down to the shipwreck, are depicted with strings attached to them, with only their silhouettes visible, as with those of the other characters in the animation. On their journey, they encounter monsters inspired by those used in Gröna Lund’s haunted house. Among those are zombies, ghosts, witches and even an octopus who work in conjunction with an evil force called “hunger”, which capsized the ship and is known to eat children. The site of the shipwreck is called the Intestinal Bay, which for Lam serves as the “belly of hunger”, and alludes to Wang keeping only the midsection of his ship.

The twins also encounter characters from Cantonese mythology and history; most notably the Lo Ting, which serves as narrator for the tale. The mythological human- fish hybrid has come to not only represent the cultural hybridity assumed by members of the Chinese diaspora, but also a duality Hongkongers feel in describing their identity. At the end of the film, the twins reunite in a hybrid form, with one as the dragon’s head and the other as its tail, not unlike the way the Lo Ting is seen as a resurrection symbol, according to folklore.

For her latest and most prestigious exhibition, Lam draws on her Cantonese heritage once again, as well her interest in diaspora and the idea of cultural preservation, to make a work inspired by Cantonese opera. The artist will be representing the Nordic Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale next year from April 20 to November 24, alongside Finland’s Kholod Hawash and Chinese Norwegian composer Tze Yeung Ho. The pavilion will be put together by Swedish curator Asrin Haidari and showcase a gestamtkunstwerk, a work composed of multiple art forms, as well as an experimental music installation and performance.

Lam is to going devise the framework of this gestamtkunstwerk and in doing so will employ the storytelling roots of her practice, which reclaim cultural ownership of “exoticised” practices and tropes, and present a new interpretation of these pre-existing narratives.

She says she centred the work around Cantonese opera as a “way to stay connected to my heritage”. The new work will continue to build on themes present in her previous works, in which she “tries to find and create a purpose within the memories that are about to fade away”, and in doing so, gives history a renewed meaning.

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