Hong Kong artist Jaffa Lam’s ceramic forest inspired by old Shanghai staircases

One of the most striking installations in the ongoing 15th edition of the Shanghai Biennale is Hong Kong mixed-media artist Jaffa Lam Laam’s forest of ceramic columns, called Windbreak (2025). The columns are similarly shaped, but their sizes vary from as small as a flute to four metres (13 feet) high, large enough to support a room. The vitrified green and grey glaze is partial and uneven, leaving the oxidised, reddish-brown clay exposed in many areas. This creates a beautiful contrast between the matt and rough surfaces. Lam is best known for site-specific, large-scale works that she often creates using found, recycled or repurposed materials. Ceramics is a relatively new medium for her. “I wanted to study ceramics at university, but it never really worked out,” she says. “So I set it aside until I went on an art residency in Longquan, [in China’s] Zhejiang province, in 2024.” Lam, who was born in Fujian province in 1973 and moved to Hong Kong when she was 12, has always been attentive to the social and historical value of skills in fading industries, from textile factories to oyster farming. In 2025, for her solo exhibition in Shenzhen’s Shekou area, called “Behind the Blue”, she used discarded blue plastic oyster barrels from the oyster farms between Shenzhen and Hong Kong to create a work that contrasts the freedom enjoyed by nature with artificial boundaries set by humans. During Art Basel Hong Kong in 2023, she produced a monumental piece called Trolley Party with recycled umbrella fabric and industrial trolleys, expanding on the themes of labour and collective identity that she has long explored, often collaborating with female factory workers for whom she holds workshops. With Windbreak, the original inspiration was not the jade-like green celadon stoneware that Longquan has been making since at least the Jin dynasty (266-420). Instead, it was a more modest material: discarded wooden stair-rail posts from old Shanghai houses being demolished. The shapes, details and irregularity of the wooden pieces intrigued her. “You don’t notice it at first, but every piece of wood is turned differently,” she says. In Shanghai, these remnants of the past are now considered antiques, Lam adds. But in Longquan, a city where crafts beyond ceramics are still very much alive, she found entire streets of skilled woodworkers. “It is a very old city, and they have a lot of old, traditional wooden buildings, and craftsmen who know how to renovate them,” she says. As the Shanghai Biennale, themed “Does the flower hear the bee?”, is centred on nature and the climate crisis the world faces, Lam felt the wooden stair-rail posts – once standing like soldiers or guardian deities in old houses, now discarded and replaced – were an apt metaphor for the way “nature tries to protect humans, even if people do not really treasure that contribution”. Hence the name of Lam’s installation, Windbreak, meaning a row of trees or shrubs that protect farms from strong winds. Seen as a symbol of broader society, the posts also evoke both the importance and the vulnerability of the memories that help define a home and community. “Those staircases connected old Shanghai,” Lam says. Often, the houses have been converted into both legal and illegal subdivided flats. The wooden staircases would be a link between different social classes – the wealthy original owners and the modern inhabitants – as well as the past and the present. Transposing the shapes into ceramics not only fuses primordial materials such as wood, soil and fire to awaken awareness of the bounty of nature, but also pays tribute to the people who have kept ancient cultural legacies alive. Each ceramic column is unique. Lam regards each piece as an individual, with some standing upright and some leaning slightly backward, as if being pushed by an invisible force. She had to overcome technical challenges. “I wanted to do them all different, and on a much larger scale, which meant a lot of trial and error,” she says. “It was a learning process. I spent five months on this one project, mixing different local clays and glazes.” Now, she is working on a new solo exhibition at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, in Wong Chuk Hang, opening in March during Art Basel Hong Kong. Shifting from the grand scale of Windbreak, she is turning to smaller, more intimate works that place greater emphasis on her personal history and emotions, while continuing to explore her long-standing themes of community, heritage and the transformation of everyday objects into art. “I am a very site-specific and city-oriented person,” she says, “but most of my work is about people.” Jaffa Lam’s solo exhibition will be at Axel Vervoordt Hong Kong from March 21 to May 23.

Hong Kong artist Jaffa Lam’s ceramic forest inspired by old Shanghai staircases

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}At the Shanghai Biennale, Jaffa Lam explores the climate crisis and community with her Longquan-celadon-style ceramic columns

At the Shanghai Biennale, Jaffa Lam explores the climate crisis and community with her Longquan-celadon-style ceramic columns