Jaffa Lam’s New Adventures: Asteroid J-734

For decades, Jaffa Lam’s art has been firmly earthbound, rooted in humble materials that she turns into abstract sculptures celebrating labour and community. In her latest exhibition, however, Lam is shooting for the stars. 

Titled Asteroid J-734, the show spans three rooms at Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Wong Chuk Hang, each showcasing a different series of work. The title is a reference to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella The Little Prince, which Lam first read as a young adult and rediscovered recently after hearing it mentioned on the radio. 

“I read it many years ago, but I didn’t understand it,” says Lam. “Then I reread it and felt like, oh my god, this is really my story.”

The Little Prince tells the tale of a pilot stranded in the Sahara who meets a mysterious young prince from another planet. The boy recounts stories about his home, asteroid B-612, and his journeys through space, during which he encountered various strange characters and made some unlikely friends, learning about love and loss while trying to find his place in the universe. Despite its many fantastical elements, The Little Prince is deeply autobiographical: Saint-Exupéry was a pilot who crashed in the desert and survived, a near-death experience that prompted him to reflect on what he was living for. Saint-Exupéry also wrote the book in the US, where he lived for roughly two years in exile after France’s armistice with Germany in 1940. While abroad, he longed for home. 

For the title of her show, Lam has changed the name of the prince’s asteroid to a coded reference to her birthday. Much like the prince and Saint-Exupéry, Lam has spent the past few years on her own search for meaning, reflecting on her childhood, where she has come from and how different relationships and experiences have shaped her life. 

After working for decades without the support of a commercial gallery, Lam joined Axel Vervoordt Gallery in 2022. Since then, she has had several career highs, including presenting a major installation at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2023; opening her largest ever solo show, Behind the Blue, at Sea World Culture and Arts Center in Shenzhen in 2025; and taking part in the 15th Shanghai Biennale, Does the flower hear the bee?, which runs until March 31.

This professional growth, however, has coincided with a time of personal loss. “For many years, I’m always looking for myself,” she says. “But the last two years have been very, very difficult because I lost my mum. That’s why [this exhibition] is so complicated.”

A life in chapters

The show opens with Lam’s latest work, a sculpture that connects Lam’s past, present and future, giving a glimpse into some physical and emotional journeys that have shaped her life. 

Endless Column is an assemblage of wooden balusters that have been scavenged from demolished houses in Hong Kong and Longquan, Zhejiang Province, where Lam undertook a residency at the Wangou Taoxichuan Art Center from August 2024 to September 2025. Alongside these are banister-like segments Lam has made from celadon, a green-glazed ceramic native to Longquan that Lam has been experimenting with. This pole of ceramic forms and abandoned balusters stretches from the floor to the ceiling, and seemingly beyond. 

The work alludes to key chapters of Lam’s life. Longquan is roughly a three-hour drive from Fuding, Fujian, where Lam spent a happy childhood before she moved to Hong Kong at the age of 12. Her arrival in the city was not easy: she was bullied by classmates and her family struggled for money. To help, she got a job at a local clothes factory, even though the legal working age at the time was 14. With time, however, Lam has come to call Hong Kong home. 

The balusters therefore point to multiple homes from Lam’s own life, but the sculpture is evocative whether viewers know Lam’s story or not. There is something in their worn, weathered forms that has the power to elicit memories from anyone who has ever left a house they’ve loved. This poignant reflection on the past is counterbalanced by the pieces of celadon, Lam’s latest discovery and literal moments of brightness, which suggest there are still exciting times ahead.

Lam was first struck by the idea to work with balusters when she was exploring Shanghai ahead of making new work for the city’s biennale. One day, she stumbled upon a row of European-style mansions dating from the 1920s. Some of them had been converted into high-end shops and restaurants, but Lam was most interested in those yet to be renovated. When she ventured inside them, she was amazed by the original fittings, specifically the sweeping staircases that Lam felt transported her to another era. 

Upon returning to Longquan, Lam was surprised to discover similar banisters had been rescued from a local demolition site by an antique dealer. Although these balusters were smaller and less ornate than the ones in Shanghai, Lam became fascinated by their shared style, which had travelled from Europe to Shanghai, then from that urban hub to a more rural area, becoming symbolic of a desirable home for millions. Even Lam’s modest childhood home had some similar details. 

Now, however, these previously precious objects are scrap wood, a fact that encourages visitors to question what we cling to and what we leave behind. At the Shanghai Biennale, Lam showed a series of balusters made entirely from celadon. By incorporating actual discarded banisters into her new works at Axel Vervoordt, Lam draws greater attention to humanity’s wastefulness, although she doesn’t want her work to be didactic.  

“I never say who is wrong and who is right. Society needs to keep improving,” she says. However, at times of rapid change, Lam thinks artists can be the “slow people” who can help others pause and consider the consequences of their actions. “I just want to make people think.” 

The great beyond

On show in the next two rooms at Axel Vervoordt Gallery are fresh takes on materials and subjects Lam has worked with in the past. The first room features a selection of sculptures made from the ribs of umbrellas, rather than the umbrella fabric that has been a feature of Lam’s work for years. This is the first time Lam has worked with these metal structures, which she has bent into sculptures inspired by stars. 

Lam was attracted to stars because, while she has been on her own search for meaning, she became interested in the many and varied ways people have looked to the skies for guidance throughout history — sometimes in vain. In The Little Prince, the prince says to the narrator: “All men have the stars … but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others, they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman, they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You — you alone — will have the stars as no one else has them … In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night …”

Like the stars that inspired them, Lam’s spindly umbrella-rib creations will mean different things to different people. Each can be read in a multitude of different ways, and each can look drastically different depending on the angle you’re looking at them from. On a material level, some sections of the sculptures have been filled with concrete, creating a visual tension between mass and lightness, solidity and fragility. They are unlike anything Lam has made before. Some of them resemble constructivist drawings that have been brought to life.

Concrete and umbrella ribs are just two of many mundane materials that Lam revels in bringing into galleries. Through this, she elevates the everyday and subtly blurs the boundaries between art and life. In the next room, Lam is showing more work made from discarded umbrellas, this time using umbrella fabric to make window-like forms that hang on the walls. (Lam works with so many hundreds of umbrellas that the fabric did not necessarily come from the same ones as the ribs in the previous room, although it might have done.)  

Lam has long been interested in how windows both connect and separate, and how they offer portals into different worlds. The dark fabrics in some of these works hint at Lam’s personal struggles over the past few years, but there are moments of hope, too. One features a patchwork of orange fabrics, which Lam picked out to mimic a photo of a breathtaking sunset a friend had taken from the Peak.

On the horizon

Asteroid J-734 ends with a room of celadon banisters Lam made in Longquan. Lam has made these works so she can install them in different ways: they can stand alone, or be stacked to build smaller versions of the column in the gallery’s entrance. These vase-like shapes share the origin story of Endless Column but, like that work, these ceramics spark thoughts and feelings outside of Lam’s autobiography. They are reminiscent of building blocks, suggesting the many ways in which different components in life can slot together to make something complete. To some, they might symbolise different facets of a person — family, friends, career and more — that combine to make someone feel whole. Or each could represent a person, with all of them signifying a community. 

Community is also at the heart of another new series of work made from umbrella ribs Lam is debuting this month in Threads of Kinship, a group show at He Art Museum (HEM) in Shunde. In these pieces, the spokes are contained within frames, with struts stitched together using thread to create Rorschach-like patterns. “It’s like a metal lace,” explains Lam. 

Lam commissioned underemployed craftswomen from the Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association (HKWWA) to help make these. Collaborating with others, and building relationships with them through artmaking, has often been as important to Lam as her finished products. She previously partnered with the HKWWA on her Micro Economic series, which was an effort to financially support and shine a light on labourers whose industries are in decline. 

The process of making the new pieces for HEM transformed both Lam and her collaborators, helping the women grow in confidence and giving Lam something to look forward to during dark times. “They didn’t believe they could do something great. [They] never think that they could show something in a museum,” she says. “When they make, they talk, and they feel more happy. I have fun with the ladies.” 

Ultimately, Lam’s quest for a purpose has shown her that she is most fulfilled when she’s pushing herself in new directions, with new materials and new collaborators. “I want to do more, experience more,” she says. She was touched when she discovered that Saint-Exupéry was a pilot as well as a writer. “To fly is an adventure. I’m still going on adventures.”  

Asteroid J-734 runs until 23 May 2026. Click here for more information.