192 Wing Lok Street

Lap-See Lam 192 Wing Lok Street Curator: Haris Giannouras Secession, Vienna September 11 – November 22, 2026

Once in a blue moon an artist emerges in a local art scene and sets a new precedent, or rather reshapes a precedent on what amount of success it is possible to have at an early stage of a career. Soon, and not much later, the artist will have filled their “slate”, checking off every credible career achievement imaginable within provincial parameters, so that the emerging label no longer fits the artist’s basket. “Once-in-a-blue-moon career” is what another artist, who was once on track for a similar path but later saw it diverge, once said about Lap-See Lam. And that’s already years ago by now.

I first intersected with the artist’s path almost a decade ago through my own affiliation with a foundation that co-produced the iteration of her seminal work Mother’s Tongue (2017–2018) that materialized as a phone app and interactive walking guide around Stockholm. I likely will be among the first writers to cover her work in more than one publication, including this one, but we lost contact over the years. At some point I could no longer keep up with the plethora of her career milestones, between international shortlists and awards, gallery representation in Southeast Asia (the coveted Blindspot Gallery) and, more recently, representing Sweden in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. I started off the new decade of the 2020s with a virtual lecture about seminal next-gen Swedish artists for Otis College of Design in Los Angeles and stressed then to those it concerned how major it was for the artist to have sat eloquently through a talk with Hans-Ulrich Obrist in connection to a group exhibition at Fondation Cartier in Paris, inserting images from the event into my slides.

Lap-See Lam’s personal family story, through her own astute sense of storytelling, was an early and specific driver of much of her earlier work. Her paternal grandmother, it so happens, opened one of the first Chinese restaurants in Stockholm, back when Chinese restaurants, through their display of chinoiserie, would epitomize an exotic window to other worlds than the very provincial disposition that marked Sweden until as late as the early 90s. Her family has first-hand experience of an evolution that ultimately led to the Chinese restaurant becoming a highly aestheticized and culturally marked site, and yet later an unfairly overlooked fixture in the urban cityscape. Once the coveted family dinner choice of the worldly Swede, gradually reduced in name to “kinesen” (the Chinese), commonly associated as an accessible fast-food lunch option.

It was an erudite choice to depart from a small window to dispense larger ideas about seismic diasporic movement over time. It has since become a blueprint, tutoring younger artists, as well as working curatorially with seasoned artists. “Find that small and manageable window from which you can branch out to big brush strokes about complex political or societal ideas. Pull the viewer in from the lower threshold of that window and catapult them out into big ideas,” I will say.

An influential artist of Southeast Asian origin once let on that artistic expressions focusing on culinary notions from the East would appear novel only to a Western eye, such as the Nordic one with its blind spots, which has lacked exposure to such, unlike in more international and less provincial art scenes than ours. Indeed, surveying art schools in the US, this seemed to be common. An idea is an idea is an idea, and sometimes merits no more than its original expression. And in that regard, Lap-See was a very early adopter of new media and technology, which became her forte. Merging storytelling with the lens of VR, digital environments and simulations, and 3D scanning has been synonymous with her trajectory.

Already before arriving at Secession, images of 192 Wing Lok Street, which Lap-See Lam has worked on together with Secession’s new curator Haris Giannouras, had piqued my utmost curiosity. The staging that foregrounds the optics of a sleek showroom of objects on mirror-coated podiums looks very little like the exhibitions I’ve seen in the past. Evidently, significant leaps have been taken also since seeing her solo (Tales of the Altersea) at the Swiss Institute in NYC three summers ago. Hence, now would be a very good moment to get back into the swing of surveying her work again.

First things first, the exhibition is devoid of any presence of video, and instead there is an abstraction of moving imagery into a bare sonic dimension, through a new sound score by Lap-See Lam’s frequent collaborators Linus Hillborg and Marlena Salonen. It streams out from a repurposed readymade air-conditioning unit in the third of three adjacent and interconnected rooms. The AC unit in and by itself has the potency to generate a space, a vivid image that can dawn before the eyes. Secondly, a very analogue and pleasant approach has been adopted, which now sees handblown glass as the predominant material currency throughout the exhibition. The first room finds Ascending, a light glass chandelier where the arms are formed by roots emerging out from the ceiling through a cracked pipe or vessel, to the simulative effect of brute outgrowth. In the second, Breath, Vessel (IV), a transparent glass vessel is draped and half-enclosed inside a bamboo tube that, by a stretch of imagination, calls to mind a compressed hourglass.

The direction around glass appears to stem from a recent residency at CIRVA, the Centre international de recherche sur le verre et les arts plastiques in Marseille. A vestibule space holds, in its corner, a piled stack of fruit baskets and boxes, calling to mind a notion that has a lineage in contemporary art. The exhibition statement is deliciously (pun intended) laconic, in contrast to overbearing texts, and volunteers to the visitor only that Lap-See Lam’s paternal grandmother once was a fruit hawker on 192 Wing Lok Street, which is found in Hong Kong.

If Lap-See Lam’s past exhibitions have borne direct and literal traces of her well-publicized personal family history, often articulated through distinct aesthetic and sometimes theatrical scenographies and set designs, whether tangible or virtual, 192 Wing Lok Street manifests what to me is a fascinating process of “reduction” or fragmentation. Imprints of heritage remain, yet any human embodiment is increasingly abstracted from explicit view. Nods to the past of several generations of family-owned restaurants take shape sparsely and economically only through the readymade remnant of a takeaway bag from the old Bamboo Garden her grandmother opened in the 1970s, adding contextually here a sense of the most organic live “flesh”. The resourceful inventiveness of the artist shows as well with the exhibition publication, where each of the few hundreds of copies has been dressed in the same bag and memento.

Instead, the mandarin, journeying through successive states of metamorphosis from store-bought commodity to organic remnants of peel, is the main character here. It comes to represent the passage of time, of uprooting, rooting and rerooting between locales. Scaffolding of glass bamboo, its legs increasingly here and there emulating the look of vessels, serves as pathways and tunnels of journey. Elongated water drips hang suspended, frozen in time, while the scene itself exudes flux and motion, suggesting colliding temporalities. Juxtaposed with a slick, austere and futuristic visuality, and the sounds of Hillborg and Salonen, the exhibition even prompts the sensation of looking back from the future.

I have come to learn that there is a certain resilience to the mandarin that evidently has been considered in the choices made for Vienna. According to the World Wide Web, the origins of the mandarin date back thousands of years, and the fruit is said to have spread from Southeast Asia and China. Curiously, it has come over time to share its name with Mandarin, the language spoken across parts of China. Unlike other fruits, such as pineapple (ananas), or other citrus fruits, such as orange (apelsin), for which Swedish has adopted sometimes idiosyncratic names that bear little resemblance to those in other languages, the agency of the mandarin, if you will, is evident in the fact that English, too, has retained the name. The word mandarin, however, appears to derive from the Portuguese mandarim, which may have been influenced by mandar, meaning “to command”. The language came to be known as Mandarin through its association with the imperial officials who used it in China. The fruit later acquired the same name, and is believed to refer to the yellow-orange colour of the robes worn by these officials.

It’s, as can be expected, a layered exhibition, revealing facets that unfold beyond its evident material and aesthetic qualities. It’s when I really survey the exhibition publication (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König/Secession) that I realise to what extent a conscious edit has been made to allocate the continued line of telling a family history and story more directly to the book, enabling the exhibition to stand alone as an “abstract” work of art and the book, too, as a literal standalone artwork. To call it a reader would be misleading; essentially, neither per se needs the other, but together many blanks are filled in.

I revise things I’ve previously known but mostly nuance them and expand my insights into the artist’s broader family history of movement and entrepreneurship after WWII, involving also aunties, “restaurant satellites” and other Nordic cities. WhatsApp conversation screenshots, including supposed Google translations between Lap-See and her aunt Wai Yee Lam, allow the artist to embark on geospatial tracking of the family footprints. 192 Wing Lok Street might have been the street where her paternal grandmother sold fruits, but this fact was only revealed to her after she came across the street, struck by its bamboo scaffolding catching her attention. It’s the sort of happenstance proving life stranger than fiction, to a degree that invention could not reach.

Already outside the galleries is a giant, towering bamboo sculpture by the foyer, standing its ground seamlessly with a great sense of belonging within this iconic architecture. Ironically, despite its imposing apparition, I don’t even notice it at first. I’m reminded of a personal story that connects me to Secession and Vienna. I once did in fact have a life here in the city involving someone who is no longer part of it. My life, not the city. We once asserted it would only be a matter of time from then until Lap-See Lam would be showing in a solo exhibition at Secession. We’d both remember the moment of declaring it and how it came about, but we also knew, in that very moment, that by the time it materialized, we would no longer be in touch; certainly, for one transient moment, we’d however think of each other. It might have taken much longer than it seemed then, but ultimately that story, too, came full circle in due time.

Some things are inevitable, and full disclosure: it takes me years, until this exhibition happens, for me to return.

Ashik Zaman