Multimedia artist Lap-see Lam’s Hong Kong show explores cultural identity
Lam turns Swedish-Chinese restaurant culture and digital defects into haunting works about migration, memory and generational loss
“Have you ever had fried bananas in Chinese food before?” Lap-see Lam asks with a twinkle in her eye over our video call between Stockholm and Hong Kong.
I admit I haven’t, at least not of the Chinese persuasion. The artist explains that fried bananas with syrup and ice cream is a typical Swedish-Chinese dish. Another is Swedish meatballs in tomato sauce served with rice. But the most remarkable is a dish called “four small dishes”. “It’s basically different dishes on the same plate, and everybody gets their own,” Lam says sheepishly, well aware of how strange it must seem to introduce a dish aimed at killing family-style dining, a hallmark of Asian culture, as one of the idiosyncrasies of Swedish-Chinese restaurants all over the country. But she should know; she grew up in one.
As with many family-run Asian restaurants, Bamboo Garden in Stockholm’s Södermalm district functions as a home base of sorts. If the walls could talk, they would give a thorough account of the Lam family’s comings and goings: life milestones, birthdays, holidays, graduations. Opened by her grandmother, who emigrated from Hong Kong in the 1970s, the restaurant has been home for Lam, 35, all her life. And she still lives above it, though she’s moved out of her family’s flat and into one with her partner.
Her family made sure to keep Lam close to her roots: “When I was younger, we would close the restaurant for a couple of weeks every summer to go to Hong Kong. We still have a lot of relatives there, my uncles and aunties and cousins.”
However close she was to the restaurant, Lam is quick to correct any impression that she was expected to take over the family business or go down a similar path. “It was quite clear that [us children] were supposed to get an education and do something else. And that creates a distance to the place as well.” Any prospective chef career being cut short before it could begin, Lam turned her eye to the arts.
Now a multimedia artist based in her hometown, she’s preparing for her first solo exhibition with Blindspot Gallery in Hong Kong, which runs until May 2. The gallery first showed Lam’s work in 2022, and has been in talks to hold a solo exhibition since. “Her works reflect the convoluted notions of belonging, being neither here nor there, a sentiment that resonates with many,” says Helena Halim, a representative of the gallery. “Hong Kong itself is a city that embodies a sense of in-betweenness.”