An Artist Who Dines with Ghosts

There’s something quietly operatic about the career of Lap-See Lam—not in scale or spectacle, but in tempo. Her work drifts like an aria overheard through walls: richly textured, half-remembered, emotionally exacting. She doesn’t shout. She haunts.

Now, with her 2025 win of the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, Lam has officially stepped into the international spotlight—though she’s long been a phantom presence for those tuned into the strange frequencies of contemporary art. Alongside a $100,000 prize, she receives a major exhibition at Oslo’s Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, the museum’s acquisition of her work, and a permanent place in the canon of artists translating memory into matter.

And make no mistake: Lam doesn’t make art about the Chinese-Swedish diaspora. She makes art from it—from its shadows, its mistranslations, its vanishing textures.

The Chinese Restaurant as Memory Machine

Lam’s practice unfurls from a deceptively simple seed: her grandmother’s Chinese restaurant in 1970s Sweden. What might have been mere autobiography becomes, in Lam’s hands, a vehicle for metaphysical drift. These restaurants, she suggests, are more than eateries; they are interdimensional portals between continents, generations, and identities—part stage set, part family archive, part ghost story.

Through Cantonese opera, shadow puppetry, and digital animation, she builds immersive environments that don’t just show history—they dislocate it. Her figures whisper, flicker, vanish. Her architecture bends and breathes. You don’t walk through a Lap-See Lam installation. You’re swallowed by it.

I’m interested in forms of generational loss and in how culture survives through distortion, repetition, and imagination.

– She has said.

These aren’t sentimental tributes to heritage. They’re gothic excavations of its ruins.

Art That Refuses to Translate

Where other artists might aim for clarity, Lam cultivates disorientation. Her materials—phantasmagoric video, stylized performance, stagecraft in virtual space—are deliberately elusive. Language slips. Identities dissolve. History glitches like a corrupted file.

This refusal to render cultural experience legible for a Western gaze is part of her quiet resistance. Her works often adopt the visual cues of amusement park rides or immersive theater—but always with a sense of unease, a knowledge that these spaces were never built for her story.

And that, perhaps, is Lam’s genius: she doesn’t reclaim space. She rehaunts it.

From Venice to Oslo: A Career in Crescendo

Lam’s momentum has been stealthy but unstoppable. In 2024, she represented the Nordic countries at the Venice Biennale, where her work offered an emotionally fractured panorama of memory and migration. Now, with the Lise Wilhelmsen award, she joins the ranks of previous recipients Otobong Nkanga, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Alia Farid—artists similarly invested in identity, displacement, and poetics of place.

Her upcoming exhibitions form a triptych of rising prominence:

• Moderna Museet, Stockholm (May 2025)
• Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (June 2026)
• Vienna Secession (2026)

But these milestones, while institutional, feel beside the point. Lam’s real terrain is liminal. She works in the half-lit hallway between memory and myth.

Why Her Work Matters Now

In an era of hyper-visible identity politics, Lam’s work does something rare: it traffics in the unseen. Not as evasion, but as testament. Her installations explore what gets lost in translation—not just linguistically, but emotionally, spatially, generationally.

She doesn’t give us tidy narratives. She gives us the afterimage—the scent of sesame oil and steam, the faded wallpaper of a restaurant long shut down, the echo of an aria sung in a dialect no one in the room fully understands.

This award makes it possible to continue the work—building, questioning, and creating with others, giving form to the unseen and the possible.

– She said after receiving the prize.

That “possible” is key. Lam’s art doesn’t mourn what was lost. It imagines what might still be built from its ashes.

The Echo Chamber of Heritage

At its core, Lap-See Lam’s practice is about diaspora as architecture: a house built out of absence, layered with echoes. She teaches us that cultural memory isn’t static—it’s not a plate of dumplings or a family photo. It’s a shifting stage, lit from below, humming with what might have been.

And in her spectral worlds, the ghosts don’t ask for exorcism. They ask for witness.