Foto: Galleri Nordenhake
ARTFORMS
Installations, video, app, sculptures.
MATERIALS / MEDIA
Using technologies including virtual reality and 3D scanning, she connects the viewer to her family history through technological innovation. Or as Nordic Art review puts it: ”Lap-See Lam demonstrates the advantages that transhumanism, technocapitalism, and post-internet art have in common.”
GUIDING INTEREST
Lap-See Lam explores questions of identity and cultural constructs through the history of her own cultural background. As the daughter of Chinese Cantonese immigrants, she uses the family’s history as a source of inspiration for her work. More specifically, her parentes and grandmother owned a Chinese restaurant for 30 years, and traces from that environment becomes the interface she uses to address questions of navigating cultural in-betweens.
QUOTES
”The Chinese restaurant is a trace of a wider global Chinese diaspora – a trace that is both something familiar in our cities, but at the same time holds the identity of ‘the oriental other’. The difference between the local guest and the ‘serving-other’ is a dichotomy that has been central to the creation of this type of business. As a second-generation Canto-Swede, I find myself navigating these cultural in-betweens, with access to both the internal and external gaze.” /Lap-See Lam in C Print magazine, 2018
”As viewers, we travel through the glitchy Chinese restaurant landscape like deterritorialized cursed ghosts in a wrecked time ship. The exoticization of Imperial China’s horror vacui aesthetics with pagodas, coiled screen walls, dragons, flowers, silk textiles, peacocks, lanterns, and porcelain vases is elevated to nearly sublime dimensions, where the technological ruin Romanticism is amplified by irritating glitches and software bugs.” /Nordic Art Review, 2019
FORMATION
2018 – 2020｜MFA, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
2013 – 2016｜BFA, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
2011 – 2013｜Idun Lovén Art School, Stockholm
LINKS
BIO
Born 1990 in Sweden. Educated at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Represented by Galleri Nordenhake in Stockholm.
Photo: Margareta Bloom Sandebäck from the magazine Konstnären
EXAMPLE OF WORK
Mother’s Tongue (2018)
Mother’s Tongue is a retro futuristic video workmade in collaboration with film maker Wingyee Wu, and produced by Mossutställningar. The story is the visual fictive stories of three women working in a Chinese restaurant, living in the past, present (2018) and future (2058). The visuals are made of 3D laser scans of real restaurants and experienced through an app.
Inspired by the framework of a tourist guide app, the wiever is guided by a voice over narrative. ”the subjective consciousness belonging to the Chinese restaurant, a ghost from the future. /…/ What happens if a place of projection suddenly looks back at us? Lap-See Lam asks.
Photos: Anna Drvnik and Lap-See Lam
The Phantom Banquet (2019)
Through a 3d scanning tool Lap-See Lam has recreated interiors from her family’s Chinese restaurants.
Photos: Lap-See Lam
