For his first personal exhibition in the United States—Altersea Tales (until August 27) at the Swiss Institute, Stockholm-based artist Lap-See Lam has created an immersive video installation that uses images taken from 3D scans she made of Western-style Chinese restaurants. Lam, whose parents ran a Chinese restaurant in Stockholm, uses this visual lexicon as an allegory of the immigrant experience as well as a backdrop against which she weaves a realistic, magical and moving narrative.
The Art Newspaper: The story of this piece begins with the Sea Palace, a veritable dragon-shaped floating Chinese restaurant that sailed from Hong Kong to Europe before going bankrupt. Your parents ran a Chinese restaurant in Stockholm, didn’t they?
Lap-See Lam: Yes, my grandmother opened the restaurant when she moved from Hong Kong. She first moved to the United Kingdom, then to Sweden, where she became a chef in a Chinese restaurant before opening her own in the 1980s. It was thanks to this restaurant that she was able to bring her sisters and brothers from Hong Kong to Sweden, because they could all work there. She called it her school, because it was there that all of her family members learned to run a Chinese restaurant, and almost all of them went on to open their own restaurants all over Sweden. My parents took over the restaurant that my grandmother had opened, but they sold it in 2014, which kind of started this whole project that I’ve been doing for all these years.
Is this family and personal history the seed of your interest in exploring the aesthetics of the westernized Chinese restaurant?
Certainly. I started the project because I had the idea of backing up or archiving our space first, just for personal reasons. But the new owner didn’t let me 3D scan initially, so I started 3D scanning other similar restaurants, and it turned into a bigger project. A few years later, I was able to 3D scan the restaurant my family owned. It started with this personal need to look at space with a kind of distance.
Lap-See Lam, Altersea Talesinstallation view, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, 2023 Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm/Berlin/Mexiko City. Photo: Alwin Lay
3D scanning is a really nice metaphor for changing that relationship, because you’re recreating the space but in a detached and emotionally cool way.
My first idea while scanning these spaces was to create these hyper-realistic images, but the scanning technique at the time was not yet developed enough, so the materials I gathered were huge and my computer was not able to handle them. That, combined with errors in the technology itself, created these flawed and glitchy images. My initial feeling was to fix it, but when I started watching it, the material itself started talking about all these things – about fragments and memories. It was like a shipwreck of ideas and cultural symbols that were slowly disappearing, and it was as if the material itself could invoke all of those ideas. It became more like a secondary image of the Hong Kong diaspora in Sweden, and it created a new space to work with.
I’m also curious about this decision to present the work in a way that surrounds the viewer.
There is an openness and directness to the immersive quality of the work. I’m interested in the idea of spatial history, so when I make these works, I recreate these spaces but I don’t duplicate them, I create another realm of space and time. Immersion is really my attempt to affect the audience in a very direct way. There is storytelling in the works, but those stories usually come quite late for me in the process. I use these spaces and I create these images as points that allow these stories and these texts to grow; I can find it very difficult to describe the work because a lot of these ideas get lost in translation and are hard to put into words, but creating these spaces through sound and images allows something else to arise that doesn’t It’s not language-based in this traditional form.
I also want to ask you about your use of a magical realistic lens to tell this story, although when I think of the Sea Palace, for example, I can see how that kind of setting is a logical extension of the work.
The Western Chinese restaurant is somehow a magical and realistic place. I find them fascinating because they have this duality in them – they’re like dream images of something perceived as Chinese, or a Chineseness, but at the same time it’s a real functioning space that holds all these stories often secrets of family, migration, belonging and dreams. I work a lot with this kind of duality.
- Lap-See Lam: Tales from Altersea, until August 27, Swiss Institute, New York
