Karena Lam

A many-faceted talent, Taiwanese Canadian star Karena Lam is known mainly as an actor, but has numerous other strings to her bow. For her performances on the screen, she became the first ever to win all of the best lead actress, best supporting actress and best new performer gongs at the Golden Horse Awards, the first for Zinnia Flower (2015) and the others for her debut film July Rhapsody (2002), which also bagged her a pair of Hong Kong Films Awards in the same categories.

She’s also a popular singer who has released four albums, from 1995’s Karena to 2004’s Dating. In recent years she has also added another string to her bow as an art curator: she curated her first show, for Japanese calligrapher Inoue Yuichi, in 2016, and added a second, for Japanese artist and illustrator Watanabe Mayumi, in 2018, both at Agnès B Librairie Galerie within K11 Art Mall. She also works extensively for the French May arts festival, curating programmes and acting as an ambassador of the event; she was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Letters by the French government in 2020 in recognition of her work promoting French culture. With a love of Polaroids since she was given a camera by her father, she released three volumes of her collections of photos, Voyages, between 2009 and 2021, through prestige coffee table book publisher Taschen.

In 2024 she exhibited some of her work alongside artist Alan Chan, starred in Sylvia Chang’s Daughter’s Daughter, plus saw the release of Worth The Wait, featuring her first fully English-language performance.

She has two daughters, from her former marriage to filmmaker Steve Yuen Kim Wai.