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Lap-See Lam
부유하는 바다 궁전 Floating Sea Palace | 2024 | 26’
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm/Berlin/Mexico City
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm/Berlin/Mexico City
Synopsis
Floating Sea Palace (2024) draws on the folklore of Lo Ting, a mythical half-human, half-fish being believed to be an ancestor of the Hong Kong people. In Lam’s retelling, Lo Ting unknowingly summons a dragon ship—linked to the real, three-storey “Floating Restaurant Sea Palace,” which was relocated in the 1990s from Shanghai to Europe and has since lived multiple lives as a restaurant, a haunted house, and, eventually, a ruin. Filmed partly aboard this vessel, the work combines 3D scans of the ship with shadow animations, alongside an original composition and sound design by Marlena Salonen and Linus Hillborg. The result is a phantom-like aesthetic that invites imaginative encounters with the story and its figures, while reflecting on transformation, translation, and a longing to return to an ever-shifting home that remains out of reach—a sea-bound archive of migration and return.
About the artist
Lap-See Lam creates mythical video installations that draw on traditional storytelling forms such as Cantonese opera and shadow-play puppetry. Her work takes a magic-realist approach, producing alternative representations of Chinoiserie shaped by imperial histories, while reflecting on her family’s migration from Hong Kong to Sweden in order to both claim and complicate this cultural inheritance. Lam’s work has been presented internationally in major institutional exhibitions, including presentations at venues such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Studio Voltaire (London), The Power Plant (Toronto), and the Nordic Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024–2025).