Shore of dreams
—the works by Lap-See Lam

The reasons why I selected Lap-See Lam are manyfold; to start with she’s from Stockholm, just like me. She also has an immigrant background, and although I grew up with my Swedish mother and not with my Serbian father, I can easily identify with concepts relating to otherness and identification. But I also knew her grandparents' Chinese restaurant Ming Garden in Stockholm, it was a landmark at the Björns trädgård, and when the family shut the restaurant down after 44 years in 2017, we were many who felt a bit nostalgic about that.

But the biggest reason is of course that I really like her work, and since I’ve just been to China, it seemed like a good opportunity to learn more about Lap-See Lam, not the least because she’s representing Sweden at the Nordic Countries Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024.

Shore of Dreams, the work of Lap-See Lam

Lap-Sam Lam uses video, sculpture, performance, smartphone apps and immersive digital installations while creating a critical third space for afterimages of the Chinese diaspora in Sweden. At the heart of her work is both absence and wildness, both survival and invention, and in the margins of this; also time and space. In her work Lap-See Lam often uses Western conceptions about China as a point of departure.

The work "Mother's Tongue" and “Phantom Banquet" developed when Lap-See Lam realized that Chinese restaurants were slowly, but steady, disappearing in Sweden. The older generations were getting too old to continue, and the younger ones had other priorities. Equipped with a 3D scanner, she travelled around Sweden to capture the interiors of various Chinese restaurants around the country. For Lap-Sam Lam, the restaurants worked as symbols for the dreams of the older generations, who had high hopes for a brighter future for their children. Working as an archivist of the Chinese diaspora in Sweden, Lap-See Lam wanted to record those disappearing environments before it was too late.

The interiors of Chinese restaurants are often very similar, almost generic, designed to please Western ideas and conceptions about what an Asian restaurant is supposed to look like. There is a fountain somewhere in the restaurant, preferably with some goldfish in, an altar and some statues. Many times, the names of the restaurants include the words Palace, or Garden. The design is built on a dream of a faraway past that has very little to do with historical correctness. It’s a projection of another place and of another time, describing more of an Asian atmosphere, than the actual facts.

Lap-See Lam’s desire to preserve those images drove her to create an archive of 3D scans of Chinese restaurants that glitched the visual aesthetics of Asian culture. Having gained recognition for a trilogy of exhibitions centred on these scans, Lap-See Lam pivoted in her Tales of the Altersea (2023) a ship named Sea Palace. In this work, she uses a dragon's head from an actual shipwreck that sailed from Shanghai to Amsterdam and then on to Göteborg in Sweden.

There, a Chinese entrepreneur waited to transform the boat into a Chinese party boat, with a restaurant for more than two hundred people, and a stage for entertainment. Unfortunately, the project was too big and a financial failure, and the boat was left in the Göteborg harbour to rot. The empty and abandoned boat from Shanghai then became a popular place for illegal rave parties and a hangout for the local drug addicts. Some parts of the interior design were sold to Gröna Lund, an amusement park in Stockholm, who used it as a part of their scenography in their Ghost House for their Halloween celebration. 

Lap-See Lam spotted the boat on its way from Göteborg to Stockholm, just as it was passing her window of the studio space at the Royal Academy of Art, and it was sheer coincidence. She started doing some research about this boat and found out that Gröna Lund (an amusement park in Stockholm) had bought it for their Halloween attraction in the Ghost House. Here, the amusement park turns an object that is associated with China into something that is hunted, something to fear and be afraid of in a ghost house.

When the original owner of the ship found out how Gröna Lund was going to use the boat, he actually took away the dragon's head. That is, in fact it isn’t a dragon's head, it’s the head of a so-called Loong, a mythical creature in Chinese mythology. In the original context, a Loong has the symbolism of imperial power, something that is very strong and impressive.

However, in a Western context the Loong became a dragon, something that at times is considered evil and dangerous. And that has a very different meaning altogether. In the end Lap-See Lam managed to convince the owner of the ship to lend her the head of the Loong for an art installation.

Lap-See Lam explores questions of representation and interpretation, working both with contemporary technology and traditional references and techniques. The notion of glitches informs the artist’s visual language, referencing a generation loss both in literal data transfer and in an idiomatic inheritance of knowledge throughout family generations. At the same time, she uses elements from traditional storytelling, such as shadow play.

She claims both the ownership of her own history, but at the same time complicates the idea of cultural heritage. There is a duality in this that characterizes many of the artist’s installations, as she uses magical imaginations of Chinoiserie defined by imperialist trading, while reflecting on the reality of migration and her own family history.

The Yellow Peril

To present the work of Lap-See Lam without mentioning the concepts and ideas of the Yellow Peril, also known as the Yellow Terror, the Yellow Menace, or the Yellow Spectre would be half work.
So, what exactly is the Yellow Peril? It is a racist colour metaphor that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast Asia as an existential danger to the Western world. The concept of the Yellow Peril derives from a "core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers", which developed during the 19th century as Western imperialist expansion defined East Asians as the Yellow Peril. Asian people were often seen as a threat to Western civilizations and in several of Lap-See Lams installations, the concept of the Yellow Peril works as a red thread.

Facts

Lap-See Lam obtained her master's degree in Fine Art in 2020 from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. In 2020, Lap-See Lam was named by American Forbes as one of Europe’s 30 most promising young people in art and culture. Lap-See Lam is represented by Galerie Nordenhake, a Swedish gallery with branches in Berlin and Mexico City. In September 2023 Nordenhake hosted Lap-See Lam's first solo exhibition in Berlin and in 2024 she represented Sweden at the Nordic Countries Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.