One of the artists being showcased at the Nordic Countries Pavilions at the prestigious art event, Lap-see Lam combines ancient mythology, allegorical tales, personal history and generational loss in her work
A dragon, a sunken ghost ship, twins girls separated at birth, a floating restaurant transformed into a haunted amusement park; the motifs present in Chinese Swedish artist Lap-see Lam’s art have the makings of an epic, mildly twisted fairytale.
Her latest fable takes the form of an immersive animated film, Tales of the Altersea (2023). The film has captivated audiences this year in Frankfurt, New York and Helsinki, where it’s been on view at the exhibition of the same name at contemporary art institute Portikus, the Swiss Institute and Kiasma, respectively, while a prequel iteration to the work is currently on view in Berlin’s Galerie Nordenhake.
Many artists see themselves as storytellers, but Lam uses stories to tell stories. An important distinguishing element of her work is how she blends her personal, diasporic experience with historical narratives and evokes a universally resonant contemporary sentiment: navigating memory and coping with generational loss. “I’m trying to create a world in which the potential of a space exists—a space that is inhabited by memories, lost worlds and lost stories.”
This combination holds true for Tales of the Altersea which was sparked by a real-life story. In 1991, a restaurant entrepreneur named Johan Wang bought the Floating Restaurant Sea Palace, a three-storey floating Chinese restaurant resembling a traditional imperial structure in the shape of a dragon, from Shanghai to Europe, docking at different cities along the way, in the hope that it would attract customers and make a profit. It did not. Defunct, the vessel was docked in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, where it remained for 27 years, ironically in a harbour called the Quay of Dreams.
In 2018, Lam was staring out of the window of a 3D scanning lab at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Art when she noticed a peculiar structure. Wang had brought the ship to Stockholm, where it was transformed into a haunted funhouse in the city’s amusement park, Gröna Lund, for Halloween. However, in the visual promotional material for the event, some alterations were made. “It was appropriated in a strange way,” says Lam, who found the existence of the vessel and its failed history both disturbing and fascinating. “It’s basically in the shape of the dragon, but for the promotional trailer they animated it into a sinister one and used it as the backdrop.” She adds that the actual ship was missing a tail and a head.
Later, she found out that, after signing the contract to sell the ship, Wang had cut off the tail and head because the buyers had misrepresented the dragon’s symbolism and presented it as an evil creature, as it is often depicted in western folklore. “It was interesting to me that [Wang] chose to do that; the act of removing the symbol really said something about that cultural misinterpretation or mistranslation that took place.” All that was left was the “belly” of the ship, which is symbolic of that “space” she aims to create in the film projected across eight channels that is Tales of the Altersea.