During its 2023 run at the Swiss Institute in New York, “as you walked down the stairs, it felt almost like you walked under the sea or into the sunken shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean,” Stefanie Hessler, its director, said. A shadow play charts the harrowing adventures of twin sisters.
The curator and artist met around 2010, when Lam was starting in art. She had been in fashion, but “was having a little bit of a crisis, not knowing what to do,” she said. A friend told her to take art classes. “I was quite introverted as a kid, and I was drawing a lot, and enjoying that,” Lam said, but she didn’t have a clear sense “that you could become an artist.” Then she did.
“What I love about her work,” Hessler said, “is that you can access it with a lot of prior knowledge, both of her work and of the different histories that she engages, but you can also just enter it with a sense of wonder and experience this fairy tale or these mythologies.”
Lam seems to approach her own art with a similar curiosity. Arriving for a residency last year at Cirva, the International Center of Glass and Plastic Arts in Marseille, France, “I was honestly quite burned out from doing exhibitions, and I didn’t have any ideas,” she said. But an earlier resident had left behind bamboo, and the glass blowers suggested working with it. She went for it, and her Blindspot exhibition includes a glass sculpture resembling a bamboo raft.
“The resilience of bamboo” has been on her mind, she said at one point.
Lately, Lam has been visiting Hong Kong regularly to see family and conduct research, as she prepares for shows this year at the Henie Onstad Art Center in Oslo and at the Vienna Secession exhibition space, and the ARoS in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2027. She has been learning about her family’s Bamboo Palace karaoke spot in Hong Kong, which ran from 1988 to 1991.
“There’s basically no documentation” of the place, Lam said, because one of her aunts discarded photo albums during a move. In dense Hong Kong, “you have to be very unsentimental about things,” she said.
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