Jaffa Lam’s New Show in Shenzhen Reflects Back on Hong Kong

When Jaffa Lam was approached last October with the opportunity to present a major exhibition in Shenzhen, she wasn’t sure she was up for it. It had been exactly a year since her mother had died, and she was still processing her grief. 

“I always worked for my mum, to prove to her that I could survive as an artist. I promised her that I could, and that I would take care of her,” says Lam. 

Lam has more than fulfilled that promise, building a successful dual career as an artist and a teacher at the Hong Kong Art School that allowed her to support her mother through her retirement. Over time, Lam’s mother began to not only accept her work, but to encourage it. So when her mother passed away in 2023, Lam was lost. “I felt like, what do I do now?”

Lam took some time out. She spoke to the “very supportive” team at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, which represents her, about postponing her next exhibition with them, then escaped Hong Kong for an artist residency in rural China. Shortly after that, she received the offer to work on a solo show at Sea World Culture and Arts Center (SWCAC) in Shekou, a coastal neighbourhood on the southwestern tip of Shenzhen. 

“I wasn’t sure I could do it,” says Lam. “It felt like a lot of pressure. They [Axel Vervoordt team] saw I was still very down. They said, ‘Just go to see the venue, have a look.’ So I went – and it picked up my spirits.”

New beginnings

Behind the Blue opened on March 24 and runs until June 22. Lam says she sees the exhibition as a “new start.” It is her largest show ever, featuring major works she has made over the past 20 years alongside new installations that were inspired by a residency she undertook at SWCAC in the lead-up to the opening. In many ways it is a vindication of Lam’s career, which she almost walked away from in 2021, when a lack of commercial interest in her work left Lam wanting to burn everything in her studio.

It is fitting that the exhibition features new works inspired by the surrounding city, rather than simply a selection of past works, because Lam’s pieces are often rooted in the places they were made. Lam’s work is multi-faceted and hard to categorise, but she is best known for large-scale installations made from found materials, often created in collaboration with local people working in struggling crafts or industries. “A lot of people are talking about things like AI, 3D printing,” says Lam. “But I’m interested in the low tech: what does it mean for a human to make something?”

Lam’s creations might be low tech, but they tell complex and multi-layered stories. One of her new works, “Oyster Buckets,” is a collection of the plastic barrels used in oyster farms in Deep Bay, also known as Shenzhen Bay, which separates the western parts of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. “When you go by the Shenzhen Bay Bridge, you can see the two different cities,” says Lam. “The oyster farms are like a terrace between the two cities.” 

Oysters have been farmed here for more than 700 years, although the practice is dying out. It was officially banned in Shenzhen’s waters in the 2000s due to fears about water quality, and oyster farms in Hong Kong have been battered by various economic and environmental headwinds that have left them on the brink. Today, various organisations are fighting to keep the custom alive. 

While in Shenzhen for her residency, Lam visited a port and learned that barrels often break off the remaining oyster farms in Hong Kong and end up floating around the bay. When fishermen find them, they bring them ashore and sell them to a recycling plant for about 25 RMB a barrel. To the men working at the port, these casks are simply a chance to earn some pocket money, but Lam saw something more in them. 

“I was joking with the curator,” she recalls. “I said to him, ‘Every time I come from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, I need my passport, my ID card. It’s the same if you want to come to Hong Kong. We humans, we set up these boundaries, but these buckets are so free.’”

It may have been an offhand comment, but the more Lam thought about it, the more she found something poignant in the barrels. “They show the illusions of the boundaries, but they also made me think – in history, how many people have died when trying to swim across here?” 

In 1949, the British closed Hong Kong’s border with China to stem a wave of immigration to the city that was caused by the Chinese Civil War. In the following decades, thousands of people attempted to swim from Shekou to Hong Kong in search of new opportunities. The numbers declined after 1980, when the Hong Kong government began repatriating illegal immigrants to the mainland.

Lam bought some barrels, much to the amusement of a fisherman. “I asked the owner and he was shocked,” says Lam, laughing. “He said, ‘What are you going to do with them?’ I said, ‘I want to display them. For art.’ And he went, ‘What for?’” 

Lam often alters the materials she uses, breaking them apart and fusing them back together in new forms, or hanging them dramatically from the ceiling. But she thought the buckets were perfect as they are. She simply placed a group of them in the gallery, then projected fuzzy photographs of the Shenzhen skyline on the walls around them. The projection functions like a mirage, creating an uncomfortable feeling of both proximity and distance between the battered barrels and the gleaming skyline, contrasting symbols of tradition and modernity.

Immigrant stories

For SWCAC curator Huang Hecheng, “Oyster Buckets” perfectly illustrates why the institution chose Lam as the first artist they commissioned to make an exhibition about the Greater Bay Area. “Jaffa’s practice is deeply engaged with issues of global migration and identity construction, resonating strongly with Shenzhen – a city of immigrants,” says Huang. “While Shenzhen, particularly the Shekou district, and Hong Kong face each other only across a bay, Shenzhen’s contemporary art institutions have rarely addressed the Shenzhen-Hong Kong relationship through solo artist exhibitions. We aim to address this gap.”

Huang even counts Lam’s conversation with the bemused fisherman — the  one who was shocked she was going to exhibit the barrels as art — as a success. “Despite Jaffa’s deep collaboration and dialogue with locals, I doubt [many people] ever grasp the work’s true significance, nor do they need to,” he says. “Contemporary art operates within society’s irreconcilable misunderstandings of it – and it is precisely through these misunderstandings that it exerts its force.”

Experiences of migration, including the story of Lam’s family, are also at the core of another installation she made for the exhibition, “Windows at Dawn.” The work features a selection of irregular, roughly A4-sized ceramic tiles laid on the floor, peeking out from beneath a curtain. 

Lam made these tiles in the months after her mother’s death at a residency in Longquan, which is the historic home of celadon, a distinctive type of green-glazed porcelain. The traditional ceramicists in Longquan painstakingly work to detailed recipes, and only with local clay, to achieve the effect they want. Lam admired their work, but the feel of clay in her hands, the physical connection with material drawn from the earth, inspired her to take her own work in another direction. 

“Longquan is only three hours by train from my hometown,” says Lam, whose family moved from Fujian to Hong Kong when she was a child. “So I got soil from a mountain in my hometown, got soil from Hong Kong and mixed it with the local soil.” Her tiles then became symbols of herself, and her own experiences migrating between places, as well as of everyone who calls more than one place home.

Changing perspectives

Lam says the curtain was added to try to recreate the light that filled her Longquan studio in the early morning, when it would flood through gaps in her blinds and make everything “look better.” But beyond that, encouraging visitors to crouch down to peek beneath the curtain adds to the physical experience of visiting one of Lam’s exhibitions. She often hangs works up high, or lays pieces on the floor, or builds installations that visitors can duck under or walk through, making her shows journeys of discovery that engage visitors’ bodies as well as their minds. 

For Huang, the most affecting work in the exhibition is one that visitors are prompted to sit in. “Under the same drop of tear” is a parachute-like installation made from recycled fabric sewn together by textile workers and housewives in Hong Kong and Guangdong, a continuation of the Micro Economy project that Lam started in 2009 to redirect money from the contemporary art world to craftspeople in contracting industries. It features a central canopy surrounded by individual hammock-like cocoons hanging from the ceiling, which visitors are invited to sit in and record a story about their hometown. These recordings are then played through the cocoons, making the work a patchwork of fabric, audio clips and human experiences.

Huang says he was initially concerned the piece was overly sentimental, but that his perspective shifted “when I witnessed an unexpectedly large number of audiences confiding private stories here – stories they wouldn’t share with others or in other spaces.” 

Lam is about to begin writing the next chapter of her own story. While working on this exhibition, she left her job as academic head of the Hong Kong Art School. She had worked there for 24 years and was a beloved mentor to thousands of students. On a practical note, the job also gave her a stable salary, something few artists have. But the loss of her mother has encouraged Lam to take the risk of being a full-time artist. 

“Of course I’m nervous,” she says. “But I have to give myself a try.” She has been invited to take part in some museum shows in China later this year, and next year will have a solo show at Axel Vervoordt in Hong Kong, but has no master plan for the future. 

“In Longquan I had the opportunity to go back to ancient heritage and crafts,” she says. “I like activating traditional crafts in a contemporary way, so I think China is an amazing place for me to work. Maybe next year I’ll go to another city, work with another craft technique. I don’t know what’s in the future, but it will be different.”

Behind the Blue and runs until June 22, 2025  at the Sea World Culture and Arts Center, Shekou, Nanshan district, China. For more information visit here.