Performance as Sculpture: Inside Florence Lam’s Art

In 2018, one week after Florence Lam had her abortion, she performed at the Mattatoio Testaccio Art Museum in Rome. She placed a helium balloon under her shirt and carefully sewed a straight line across the fabric, making sure not to pop the balloon beneath. The performance lasted for an hour. It must have been excruciating, but Lam says she needed to channel the inexplicability of that experience through her art. 

Her body created something that she “was not ready for,” she says, but the pregnancy had already transformed her body in some way. “There was a lot of energy in my body. I needed to transform that energy into something else,” she says. 

As a child, Lam had always liked drawing. She wanted to become a painter but was drawn to sculpture during her foundation year at Central Saint Martins. But rather than shaping and carving wood, stone or clay, like her other classmates, she started sculpting performances. For Balloon Performance, her graduation project in 2014, she released balloons into the air, watching them dance, and drift to the ground. The way her body responded to the balloons as they wheezed in the air became a crucial part of the work. It was a metaphor, perhaps, for the ephemerality of life and performance itself. 

The decision to do a piece of performance art was shaped by her limited studio space. “I had to share the same 100-square-metre space with 20 other students. I was trying to make something quite mobile. With balloons, I only had to inflate them,” she says. 

For Lam, performance art is the most malleable of all art forms. And indeed, the artist’s performances rarely follow a set plot; none of her works are scripted. They might consist of a series of whimsical gestures, like Balloon Performance, or they might be more theatrical, as in the recent Nvwa and Her Lost Child, in which Lam kneads a giant piece of clay into the shape of a human, much like the way Nvwa creator of all humans in Chinese mythology — also known as Nuwa and Neoi5 Wo1 in Cantonese (女娲) — transformed her clay into boys and girls. 

Lam almost always uses another object in her performances; she believes that objects tell their own histories. “Our bodies have memories, but I also feel objects have their own memories,” she says. An animist, Lam believes there is a soul inside every object. “I suppose I don’t see that much of a hierarchy between humans and the objects around us,” she says. The artist is part of a larger movement rejecting the worldview that humankind is the most important entity in the natural ecosystem. 

As humans, however, we often have a hard time grasping what’s beyond us. How do we go beyond human-centricity? “I think it’s about leaving space,” says Lam. “To acknowledge that there is something in everything that we don’t know or cannot control.” The artist is hoping to express that sensitivity in her art. She says she never discards any of the objects she performs with, and even if she changes the form of the object, she prefers to see it as transformation. 

As part of Current Plans’ Currently Still Planning to Perform group performance in 2023, Lam stuck a litany of coins to her body until they became an armour of sorts. Then she suddenly shook her body fervently, the coins coming off her, embodying the tension between security and weight that needs cast off. 

In that case, Lam notes that some audience members might have seen the performance as an attempt to shake off the capitalist system. But always prefers to leave her art up open for interpretation. The one thing that she absolutely requires of herself is to be authentic. “Performance art is such a transparent art,” she says. “People see when you are acting, if you’re concealing something. [As a performer], you need to accept everything you are going through, everything you are feeling, even the parts that you feel ashamed of.” 

In Maternal Water (2022), Lam dragged a heavily-soaked mattress out of a pool and wrapped it around herself, evoking the image of a fetus surrounded by amniotic fluid in the mother’s womb – one of many works excavating the idea of motherhood in the years following her abortion. “I suppose I am using performance art to try to untangle what I was feeling, and maybe to find an answer, but it’s difficult to explain what I’m looking for,” she says. She is still not sure if she has found the answer. 

If there is one central thread running through Lam’s practice, it is the idea of weight – the weight of a soaked mattress, the weight of coins, but also the weight of history, both personal and collective. Weight is also defined by its opposite, like the lightness of balloons twirling whimsically in the air, or the lightness of the fingers as they thread across a shirt, careful not to burst the helium balloon underneath. In Lam’s work, one seems to experience the dichotomy of the human condition, the idea that, despite life’s unrelenting strain, there is levity, and one must still find hope. 

In 2021, Lam co-founded Per.Platform with Juliana Chan, a fellow curator. Per.Platform’s the goal of nurturing the next generation of performance artists. Aside from connecting performance artists with galleries or fairs, Per.Platform also co-host HICCUP, a performance art festival that was held from October 25 to November 10 at Tai Kwun. Having briefly stayed in Europe after her master’s studies in London, the artist’s original intention was to bring European performance artists to Hong Kong, and vice versa, but that plan fell by the wayside during the prolonged pandemic period. 

The artist is particularly drawn to the performance art scene in Eastern Europe. “I think in Eastern Europe and Hong Kong, performance artists are creating with very limited resources,” says the artist, referring to the limited infrastructural support in both regions. Hong Kong and many countries in Eastern Europe also share similar histories. They are small by land mass, but were loud in their cries for democracy. Both places underwent a period of colonial or pseudo-colonial rule — Hong Kong by the British, Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union — which Lam says informs the way they think about things.

At the beginning of the Ukraine-Russian war, Lam developed a performance titled Zirka, the Ukraine word for little star, which explores the natural phenomenon that smaller stars burn slower than their bigger counterparts when they travel in space. “I wanted to send a message to my Ukrainian artist friends,” she says. She mentions one friend in particular who insisted on staying in the country despite the war. “I asked him if he’d leave Ukraine,” she recalls, and he replied that he needed to stay to truly experience what his country is going through. Sometimes you don’t know how you would feel until you are right at the centre of the action, says Lam. 

Which brings the conversation back to her pregnancy. “Before I became pregnant, I always thought, if I became pregnant, I’d definitely keep the baby,” she says. “I realised there are things in life, where you’d never know how you’d react, what decision you’d make until you’re in that situation.” Lam’s approach to performance mirrors that – she doesn’t know what she’d do until she starts performing. “When I’m performing, somehow I’ll have these sensations or impulses, which nudges me to perform the next action.” 

Is there anything she seeks as an artist? She pauses. “Beauty, I suppose.” What kind of beauty? It’s difficult to explain, she says. “But I was doing this performance art workshop in Poland. We were in a group and suddenly a girl came over to interact with me. It was all improvised, and it was such a magical moment. That to me, is beauty – that moment of genuine connection.” 

Lam is performing on December 7, 2024 at Avant Garde Now: Performing for the Cameras at M+, and at Para Site as part of The Embrace and the Passage exhibition on December 13 and 14, 2024, and January 11, 2025.