The Artist: Lap-See Lam’s Shadow Worlds

Lap-See Lam’s work begins with a restaurant that no longer exists.

Choy’s Garden, opened by her grandmother in Stockholm in the 1970s and later run by the artist’s aunt and uncle, was a defining space of her childhood before it closed permanently in 2014.

Its disappearance prompted Lam to begin documenting the site through 3D scanning, developing a practice that now draws together family history, Cantonese migration and the mythologies surrounding Chinese restaurants in Europe.

That history has taken on greater political resonance as anti-immigration sentiment in Sweden has moved from the margins into the mainstream. Lam’s films and installations, now on show in a new exhibition at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, Norway, do not address that shift directly. Yet they are rooted in questions of memory, belonging and the feeling of displacement – and in the experience of communities increasingly exposed to suspicion and hostility.

Lam was born in Stockholm in 1990 and trained at the Royal Institute of Art. Her grandmother emigrated from Hong Kong to Sweden in the 1970s and opened one of the first Chinese restaurants in Stockholm, Choy’s Garden, which was later run by Lam’s aunt and uncle. By her own account, Lam was practically raised inside it.

The restaurant closed permanently in 2014, and it was that closure – and the physical erasure of a place that had structured her entire childhood – that pushed Lam toward the 3D-scanning and shadow play work she is known for today, in an attempt to hold onto something that has materially disappeared.

Lap-See Lam, recipient of The Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award 2025. Photo: Simen Øvergaard. Courtesy Henie Onstad Kunstsenter

Lam’s new exhibition, Ombres, on show at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter until 3 January 2027, showcases the artist’s work following her attainment of the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, one of the most significant contemporary art prizes both in Norway and internationally. She is the fourth recipient.

The Kunstsenter sits low against the water, close to the calm inlets of the Norwegian archipelago. The Scandinavian summer means long, bright days, with the sun barely setting. Lam has designed Ombres to put that light out almost entirely. Walking into the two galleries, the space has been darkened into something closer to a cave than a gallery. The rooms are lit only by projection and a web of moving cast shadows. In one corner, a single motorised figure is illuminated by a green glow. This is the protagonist of Lam’s work, Julie, who forms a vessel through which to explore the fractured feelings involved in migration, inheritance, and the particular ache of belonging to multiple places at once. 

Lap-See Lam, Tales of the Altersea, 2023 (installation view, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main). Photo: Alwin Lay. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake

In Chinese shadow play, a tradition older than two thousand years, cut-out figures are held between a lamp and a translucent screen, their silhouettes sometimes tinted or detailed in colour so that even the darkness carries a trace of pigment. Centuries later, when the plays crossed into Europe, they became known as ombres chinoises, literally translating to ‘Chinese shadows’, and became part of  the West’s decorative fantasy of the East. Lam’s shadow plays are scored with a dense, immersive soundtrack. Her figures let through gesture, motion, and a silhouette, but never the full, textured body.

The first room of Ombres is dominated by a large-scale square structure, within which visitors are ringed by four screens, the shadow play unfolding on every wall around them at once. In the corner of the adjoining room, a motorised apparition of Julie hangs apart from the screens entirely. Her limbs twitch and drift on hidden motors, lit from behind by that same artificial green glow. Julie is derived from an earlier video series detailing twin sisters, Tales of the Altersea (2023) and Dreamers’ Quay (2022).

The former plays out Julie’s separation from her sister as she swims through an underwater world wearing a dragon’s head, searching for reunion. Both video works are shown here, looped together for the first time with no correct point of entry or starting point. Projections collage over one another with the delicacy of cut-out lace, as shadows slide across the floor and beneath visitors’ feet.

Lap-See Lam, Ombres, 2026 (installation view, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter). Photo: Magnus Gulliksen. Courtesy Henie Onstad Kunstsenter

All three works feature a dragon-shaped restaurant ship known as the Floating Sea Palace, which was built in Shanghai but sailed to Europe in the early 1990s. The ship was commercially unrelated to Lam’s own family restaurant business, but strikingly similar in fate. As the restaurant failed, the ship washed up in Gothenburg, stripped of its head and tail. It became a haunted funhouse.

Lam stumbled on this story by accident as an art student, mid-way through 3D-scanning her own family’s restaurant. She saw an interesting dialogue between the story of her own familial restaurant and the Floating Sea Palace. The second room screens Floating Sea Palace (2024) on a narrow landscape screen, which draws on the folklore of Lo Ting, a mythical half-human, half-fish believed to be the ancestor of the Hong Kong people. The film slides between documentary footage of the real ship and spectral 3D renderings of it as a restaurant and wreck. A Singing Chef narrates, set to an original score and sound design by Marlena Salonen and Linus Hillborg that gives the whole piece a phantom-like quality. 

Lam never outrightly states the polemic aspects of her work. Ombres reads as one continuous environment, where myth and personal family history function as traces and, like shadows, each holds the shape of something it cannot fully restore. Myth, after all, is historically where most of us go when the ground gets unsteady, and a way of giving some sort of resolve to difficult past histories. Lam handles that artistic instinct with real skill, creating a complex fantasy world that carries the weight of fractured histories and a lingering, unresolved sense of seeking belonging.