Nikki Lam’s Unshakeable Destiny

When Nikki Lam was a child, her mother worked at a video rental shop in Tsim Sha Tsui. It was unassuming from the outside, hidden upstairs in a nondescript building, but it opened a whole new world for Lam. 

“I have vivid memories of my mum bringing home films to watch,” she says. “When I became a teenager, I started watching all the classics, French New Wave, Taiwan New Wave films – and all the weird stuff. I remember at one point my mum brought home a Vincent Gallo film. I was like, ‘What is this?’ I didn’t understand what I was watching, but I have positive memories of that time. It’s my origin story, really.” 

Now, Lam is an artist and curator living in Melbourne who works primarily with video. To date, her short films have mostly been shown in galleries, but she is receiving increasing attention from the film industry. In June this year, she premiered her most ambitious work yet, The Unshakable Destiny, a 50-minute-long film that stitches together a trilogy of her video art works, at the Sydney International Film Festival (SIFF). 

The Unshakable Destiny was five years in the making, created as part of Lam’s doctorate on moving images among the Hong Kong diaspora. Lam began working on it in the aftermath of the 2019 protests that rocked her hometown, which prompted her to reflect on the role of art — and in particular the medium of video — during times of change. Its title is taken from a phrase used by Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s last British governor, during the 1997 handover ceremony. 

Lam released the first chapter, the unshakable destiny_2101, in 2021. It is a roughly six-minute video that is part homage to Wong Kar-wai, part reflection on Asian futurism, questioning how Hong Kong has been captured — and perhaps stereotyped — on film. That was followed by Reprise (2023), a 13-minute account of a woman’s day, primarily set in a cha chaan teng where characters talk about feeling caught in a loop, unable to make meaningful change in their lives. 

Finally, there is Retrograde (2025), which shifts the film into more personal territory. Retrograde is largely a behind-the-scenes documentary of Lam and Felix Ching Ching-ho, who also stars in the first film‚ travelling around Hong Kong visiting places of personal significance to Lam. Some scenes take place at the housing estate in Fo Tan where Lam grew up, others on a boat trip along the city’s coastline that echoes a journey she took to scatter her mother’s ashes.

There are staged elements, but the bulk of the footage features seemingly unscripted conversations between the pair that get to the concerns at the heart of the trilogy: of what it means to be part of the Hong Kong diaspora, of how it feels to move away from your hometown, of the tension between your memory of a place and its current reality.

Art and cinema

Lam originally created the trilogy to be shown in galleries. This allowed her to alter the environments in which the videos were screened, so that she could draw out certain ideas from the works. For example, when _2101 has been exhibited, Lam has sometimes installed it behind a beaded curtain identical to one that appears in the video itself. 

These curtains, Lam says, are “working with the theory of Hong Kong being a culture of disappearance.” The idea was articulated by Ackbar Abbas in his 1997 book Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, in which he proposes that the city’s unique culture can be hard to see — or define — because it is often obscured by political narratives. 

It is not possible to rearrange a cinema in the same way you can a gallery, so Lam was initially hesitant when Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd, a curator at SIFF, asked if she would be interested in creating a theatrical version of the work. But she is glad she did. “It was great to be able to sit through the whole three films in a linear format with the lush, beautiful sound mix in a cinema with an audience,” she says. “I’m still processing it.” 

While the cinematic format has limitations, it also offered Lam new opportunities. The film reflects on cycles — of history, of life and death —  but is also itself cyclical. “In the linear format, some cues come back a lot more obviously,” says Lam. The most conspicuous of these are symbols of Hong Kong, like bauhinias and traditional tearaway calendars, and settings like a chaan cha teng. All these could have come straight out of the world of Hong Kong’s most famous filmmaker: Wong Kar-wai.

Wong Kar-wai: Inspiration or Limitation?

The Unshakable Destiny begins as a homage to Wong Kar-wai. “Look, I am a fan,” says Lam. “But his language has translated into this almost Orientalist imagination of what Hong Kong used to be. In the Mood for Love was mostly shot in Thailand, so he has always been constructing nostalgic images in plain sight, but I don’t think the international audience has picked that up.” Lam wanted to make Wong’s world-building clear, so ends _2101 is a wide shot revealing that the character’s Wong-inspired room is a plywood set, a fabricated fantasy.  

This simultaneous respect for and questioning of Wong is one of the many dualities that define The Unshakable Destiny: it is about the past and the future, a desire to leave your home and a longing to return, and sometimes pierces moments of sadness with humour. 

One of the most delicate lines the film straddles is between autobiography and fiction. Retrograde, the final, documentary-style chapter, features Lam travelling to sites from her childhood and mourning the loss of her mother, who died between the making of the second and third films. There are intensely personal moments but, because of the constructed nature of the first two parts, there is a lingering question about whether certain elements of Retrograde might be fabricated, too. Lam seems to encourage this questioning, saying at one point in the film: “I don’t want to share too much of myself. I don’t think an artist should necessarily be transparent.” 

Now the film is finished, Lam is glad that she allowed glimpses into her own emotions, but hopes that viewers leave reflecting more deeply on the ideas the film contains, rather than her own backstory. “Diaspora artists are often asked to share our trauma and our migration experience,” says Lam. “Of course those things are big parts of a lot of artists’ practices, but that shouldn’t be the only lens their work is experienced through.”

Looking ahead

In October, The Unshakable Destiny trilogy will be exhibited at the University of Westminster in London as part of the Brent Biennial. This is the first time all three will be shown simultaneously in a gallery. 

While in London, Lam is also taking part in a residency at Studio Voltaire gallery, where she will continue her research for her next work: a video- and scent-based piece about agarwood, the incense tree that gave Hong Kong its name. Most of the city’s agarwood trees have been logged, and the remaining few are vulnerable to poaching. 

“I’ve noticed that there’s now a lot of agarwood incense and essential oils that you can gift to friends or family living in the UK or Canada or wherever, so they can have a smell of Hong Kong,” says Lam. “Again, it’s a constructed nostalgia that I’m interested in – what Hong Kong used to smell like is not in living memory.” 

Lam is also hoping to incorporate stories from her father’s family, Tanka people who docked their fishing boats in Hong Kong before British colonists arrived, and the legend of the Lo Ting, a mythical human-fish hybrid that has become a symbol of Hong Kong people and culture. “The Lo Ting is believed to be a Tanka story, but the myth has very much been deepened by artists,” says Lam. Most famously, artist, curator and critic Oscar Ho revived the myth in a 1997 exhibition. “I would really love to take on that lineage and play with it.” 

For now, Lam is planning to exhibit the agarwood piece in a gallery, where she can more easily work with scent. The resources required to make more long form, feature length works for cinema are prohibitive but, hesitantly, Lam admits she is not ruling it out. “If someone offered me funding, a producer, a crew, and says, ‘Do you want to do this?’ I wouldn’t say no,” she says, laughing. “I’d like to explore it.”