Drawing on her diasporic experience, Cantonese-Swedish artist Lap-See Lam engages with the theme of decay on several levels: decay of memory and identity, degradation of image quality, and loss of cultural meanings in intercultural translation. She started by trying to document the interior of Chinese restaurants facing closure in Sweden. The 3D-scanning technology she had selected failed to capture the images accurately, resulting in glitches and degraded image quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her video installation Mother\u2019s Tongue <\/em>(2018), a collaboration with filmmaker Wingyee Wu, these glitch-ridden restaurants were remodelled digitally, becoming the background visuals for narratives by women from three generations of restaurant workers that mingle the issues of languages, identity, and life in diaspora. The degraded imagery thus became a metaphor for the intergenerational decay of cultural memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Altersea <\/em>(2022\u201325) took these notions of decay one step further. Central to this series is the story of Floating Sea Palace, a mobile Chinese restaurant hosted in a dragon ship. When the restaurant closed in the early 2000s, the vessel was repurposed into a haunted house in Stockholm. The restaurant\u2019s dragons, a symbol of good fortune in Chinese mythology, were recast as ominous figures from Western folklore. Lam explores the boat\u2019s decaying physical structure alongside the waning of a cultural concept at the crossroads of intercultural translation and migration. Floating Sea Palace<\/em> (2024) echoes this theme of decay by introducing the character of Lo Ting, a half-human, half-fish figure believed to be the ancestor of Hong Kong people, who were among the first Chinese restaurant runners in Europe. At the film\u2019s end, the dragon ship splits into three parts, with its head and tail drifting apart and the body sinking into the sea. The manner of its decay resonates with the fate of Lo Ting, a character forever trapped in the ambivalence of its dual identity. The film thus talks toward immigrants\u2019 struggles with drifting among multiple identities and with the fading of an original and disambiguated identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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