Artists

Lap-See Lam

Press release

Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm presents Bird’s Nest Street, Lap-See Lam’s first exhibition with the gallery since several years of intense institutional activity, most recently her ongoing solo exhibition 192 Wing Lok Street at the Vienna Secession. The exhibition brings together a new body of sculptures based on bamboo scaffolding joints, a raft, a chandelier - all rendered in glass - and a wall-mounted sculpture that generates a soundscape throughout the gallery. The title has autobiographical origins. Wing Lok Street in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district is known locally as Ginseng and Bird’s Nest Street. Lam documented bamboo scaffolding there as part of her research and later learned that her paternal grandmother once sold fruit and vegetables at the same spot. The street becomes a site where family lore and Lam’s own research intersect across time and space. Through a process of revisiting sites, stories, and personalities, Lam’s art practice closes loops and opens new ones. Bamboo is a material full of cultural history and significance. In Hong Kong it is still used for scaffolding and has traditionally been the building material for Cantonese opera theatres, yet the knowledge of building with it is dying out. Working with Daisy Pak, one of the few women experts in the ever-diminishing field, Lam explored this specific vernacular engineering and developed a series of typologies in glass. For over a year, Lam has travelled regularly to Marseille for an intermittent, intensive residency at Cirva, the International Centre for Research on Glass and the Visual Arts. There she explored the potentialities of this medium, which carries with it its own art-historical context. Lam brings together these materials in a taxonomy of dislocated bamboo sections, junctions and connections in glass. The mismatch is deliberate: a material known for its tensile strength and flexibility is remade in one that is inherently brittle. This incongruous translation from one medium to another mirrors Lam’s ongoing exploration of generational loss and of how diasporic stories and ancestral legacies are interpreted, and misinterpreted, across cultures and locations. The cloudy transparency of the glass suggests a ghost structure. From a distance, the constructions look like dusky, shimmering cityscapes emerging from a reflecting sea. Up close, the variously hued joints recall digital models. Cut loose from any larger structure and set on their mirrored plinths, they seem to float freely, as if in an endless digital expanse. On a screen, a roll of the mouse would rotate such a virtual object on the XYZ axes. Here they stand still and fragile, poised and arranged in constellations, punctuated by glass mandarins, shoots and one or other actual plastic bag. In one room, a bamboo raft (in glass, of course) has come ashore. A perilously thin glass shoot acts as a provisional mast holding a flimsy plastic bag sail (or is it a flag?). The glistening makeshift construction suggests an ambitious journey contingent on humble materials. Mandarins surround the raft like washed-up flotsam, floating fruits setting down roots in distant lands. Furthest in to the gallery, a glass chandelier hangs from the apex of the ceiling. The sculpture again depicts bamboo, but this time from below. Bamboo spreads through underground stems called rhizomes, which can travel several metres a year from the parent plant. While valued for its resilience and adaptability, certain species are also considered invasive when introduced into new environments. Hung overhead, alight and charged, the chandelier brings the hidden root system into view, as if the unseen ties that bind generations across distance had been made briefly visible. Throughout the exhibition a mysterious soundscape acts as a backdrop for the work. Its source is initially unclear and its character hard to define. The sound comes from an old, beat-up air-conditioning unit mounted on the wall, out of place in this pristine white cube filled with elegant sculptural arrangements. It has been repurposed and modified as a resonating box - a kind of speaker - and, in collaboration with composers Marlena Salonen and Linus Hillborg, given a new voice. It is part music, part the distant sounds of a city, part the whirring of a defunct machine. Evoking both past and future, it haunts the space. Lap-See Lam’s glass works were produced and realised during the artist’s research residency at Cirva (the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Centre) in Marseille, France. Technical team: Alexandre Mouillet, Hana Oľhová, Thomas Paynel, Cyrille Rocherieux, David Veis, Natalie Veken and Brigita Gantar.