Bamboo Palace, Revisited: A Reflective Homecoming Exhibition

Description

Blindspot Gallery presents Lap-see Lam’s Asia debut, Bamboo Palace, Revisited, a reflective homecoming exhibition exploring home, belonging and the Hong Kong-Chinese diaspora.

Drawing on her upbringing in a Hong Kong immigrant family that ran a Chinese restaurant in Stockholm, Lam examines migrational movement, generational loss and the exoticisation of cultural symbols through speculative fiction and mythology. Her practice reinterprets traditional storytelling forms, including shadow play and Cantonese opera, alongside 3D scanning technology.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is “Floating Sea Palace,” developed from “The Altersea Opera,” presented at the Nordic Pavilion during the 60th Venice Biennale. The work follows Lo Ting, a primordial human-fish hybrid mythologised as the ancestor of the Hong Kong people.

Alongside the film, Lam presents her latest hand-blown glass sculptures and neon installations, created during her residency at the International Research Centre for Glass and Visual Arts (Cirva) in Marseille. The sculptures draw on bamboo, referencing both the temporary bamboo theatres used for Cantonese opera and the name of the artist’s family restaurants. One of the notable works is “Raft, Mandarin (I),” a glass mandarin floating on water, honouring her paternal grandmother, who worked as a fruit hawker in Hong Kong from the 1950s to 1970s.

The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, from 10:30 to 18:30, and on Sunday and Monday by appointment via 2517 6238 or email. It is closed on public holidays.