Bamboo Palace, Revisited /
Blindspot Gallery /
Hong Kong /
Mar 23 – May 2, 2026 /

With Bamboo Palace, Revisited, the gallery space at Blindspot has been transformed into a labyrinth in which visitors can almost lose themselves, or at least lose their usual benchmarks. This arrangement perfectly aligns with Lap-See Lam’s work and allows us to journey with her through the meanders of memory and the collective history of Hong Kong.

Born in Stockholm as a second-generation immigrant, the artist has spent nearly a decade exploring the culture of the Hong Kong diaspora, focusing in particular on the transformations and glitches that occur through spatiotemporal displacement. Her research delves into her own family history, which she weaves together with the history of the territory through myths, craftsmanship and techniques. This is how she came to work with shadow play, an art form that travelled from Europe to China in the 17th century.

More recently, since her participation in the Nordic Pavilion in Venice in 2024, she has been tracing the fate of a Chinese ship built in Shanghai and transported to Scandinavia to serve as a floating restaurant. With its dragon head and tail, it seems the very embodiment of exoticism. For Lam, its conversion into a haunted boat, now moored in a Stockholm amusement park, marks the starting point of a series of works that intersect and echo one another, reflecting on transformation, gaps and the blurred spaces of memory.

Raft, Mandarin (II) (2026) opens the exhibition. A mandarin orange, delicately wrapped in a transparent veil, rests on a bamboo raft. Sculpted in glass, the work immediately plays on stark contrasts between transparency and opacity, vulnerability and solidity. The vessel, itself fragile, carries this singular fruit, a companion on a mysterious drift.

For Lam, the mandarin holds two meanings. On a personal level, it recalls the story of her paternal grandmother, who sold fruit in Sheung Wan in the 1960s. On a historical level, it is the last of the citrus family to have travelled from China to Europe, where it was named by Swedish explorer Pehr Osbeck. Too fragile for long journeys, it counted among highly prized goods from Asia, and was later named by the French in reference to the robes of Chinese scholars. Fantasies, reappropriation and the displacement of cultural references are thus already at play in this first work. What remains of this symbol in our globalised world? Like time, the raft glides on, carrying everything towards a floating elsewhere – that of memory.

This is the first time Lam has created glass sculptures. The work results from her residency at Cirva in Marseille, where she was able to experiment alongside master glassmakers with various ways of working with the material. Residencies there last for two years, with several stays, allowing artists to develop their projects gradually as they explore the properties of this new medium. It was in this context that Lam chose to work with bamboo, both by blowing glass through its hollow tube and by reproducing bamboo stalks in glass.

Breath, Vessel (I) (2026) emerges from these experimental techniques. Once again, it is the contrast of materials that first strikes the viewer: the rigidity and opacity of bamboo are set against the soft roundness and transparency of glass, yet their forms seem to embrace and complete one another. The work feels full and sensual, the bamboo giving birth to the glass bubble, allowing this foreign element to swell within it, opening up an unknown space.

Bamboo holds a special place in Lam’s practice. First, it was part of the name of the restaurants opened in Stockholm and Helsinki by her family members, and later the name of a karaoke bar opened by an uncle who returned to settle in Hong Kong. Beyond this personal connection, bamboo is the quintessential material of Hong Kong, used both for temporary Cantonese opera houses and for the scaffolding that inhabits the territory’s urban landscape. 

These glass installations form a perfect introduction to the video Floating Sea Palace (2024), which occupies an entire wall of another gallery and serves as the centrepiece of the exhibition. The film draws on multiple techniques that Lam has mastered over the years: much of it unfolds as shadow play created from 3D scans of the family restaurant on one hand and the dragon boat on the other, which Lam was able to scan for the Venice Biennale. These digitised spaces also form the backdrop of her previous films, particularly Tales of the Altersea (2023). Although made after the latter, Floating Sea Palace serves as its prologue, and we encounter certain protagonists again, such as the dragon spirit. This time, Lam wanted to explore more deeply the history of Hong Kong through the hybrid figure of Lo Ting, the territory’s mythical ancestor. Yet the artist seeks above all to extend the work’s reach beyond local references. To this end, she asked the two actors who embody Lo Ting, Bruno Hibombo and Ivan Cheng, to enrich the myth by bringing their own interpretations to it.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of Lam’s work is its collaborative nature. Whether with techniques, music or costumes, she likes to surround herself with other artists who complexify her relationship to history and memory. For this film, for example, she also collaborated with Kholod Hawash, an Iraqi artist based in Finland, who created costumes inspired by Iraqi and Mesopotamian legends featuring fish-men. She worked with a traditional technique used on handmade Iraqi quilts, connecting Lo Ting to Persian folklore.

Moving between Nordic landscapes and aquatic scenes, the film unfolds like a dream that blends cultures and eras. For Lam, there is no need to follow the film’s narrative; it is enough to let oneself be carried by its poetry and emotional current. The sea and the abyss offer the artist an ideal space where dreams, reality, temporalities and geographies overlap. The marine element, with its shifting liquidity, takes precedence over the bamboo that structures the sets and the dragon-ship. On one side, there is mastery, order and the construction of the world; on the other, its slippage, its elusiveness and perpetual transformation. At the end of the film, the boat sinks.

The final installation in the exhibition, Generation (2026), depicts an adult and a child, both seated, facing the video as if watching it. Their bodies are transparent and made of luminous neon. Our gaze passes through them yet they radiate throughout the room with their strange blue halo. The transmission of culture is perhaps somewhere within this elusive aura.

Lam’s practice is a constellation of elements that constantly reconfigure and question one another. By blending traditional and contemporary media, and multiplying collaborations, she seeks an artistic form capable of embracing its own enquiries, leaving room for fissures and diversity. It is no surprise that light lies at the heart of her practice, along with its corollary, shadow. A prism comes to mind, multiplying angles through the diffraction of light, splitting the straight line of reality into diverging paths. The effect is one of fragmentation and expansion simultaneously.

Lam’s work reminds us how every culture, every identity, is constantly enriched by the gaze of others, transforming and unfolding anew each time it is looked at.

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重遊竹林閣
刺點畫廊
香港
2026年3月23日至5月2日

「重遊竹林閣」將刺點畫廊的展覽空間轉化為一座迷宮，參觀者可以近乎迷失自己，或至少失去平日的基準。這樣的空間安排與林立施的創作完美契合，讓我們得以隨她一同穿梭於記憶的曲折與香港的集體歷史之中。

林立施生於斯德哥爾摩，是第二代移民。近十年來，她持續探索香港離散社群的文化，特別關注在時空位移中產生的轉變與斷裂。她深入研究自身家族歷史，透過神話、工藝與技術，與這片土地的歷史交織。在這樣的脈絡下，她開始運用17世紀由歐洲傳入中國的皮影戲作為藝術形式。

近年來，自2024年參與威尼斯北歐館展出後，她開始追溯一艘中國船隻的命運。那艘船建於上海，後被運往斯堪地那維亞，改建為一間水上餐廳。船頭與船尾的龍形裝飾，彷彿成為異國情調的具象化象徵。該船其後改裝成一艘「鬼船」，停泊於斯德哥爾摩的一個遊樂園中，對林立施而言，這正是她一系列作品的起點。這些作品彼此交錯、相互呼應，共同反思轉化、缺口，以及記憶中那些模糊不清的空間。

《竹筏，柑橘（II）》（2026年）為展覽揭開序幕。一顆柑橘被細緻地包裹在透明薄紗之中，靜置於一艘竹筏上。作品以玻璃雕塑而成，立即呈現出鮮明的對比：透明與不透明、脆弱與堅實。本身也脆弱的載體，承載著獨特的果實，如同在神秘漂流中的同伴。

對林立施而言，柑橘蘊含雙重意義。在個人層面上，柑橘讓她想起祖母1960年代於上環販賣水果的故事；在歷史層面上，柑橘是橘子類中最後一個從中國傳至歐洲的品種，由瑞典探險家佩爾．奧斯貝克命名。由於柑橘不耐長途運輸，它曾是亞洲珍貴商品之一，後來由法國人命名，靈感源自中國文人服飾的長袍。幻想、再詮釋與文化符號的位移，在首件作品中已然展開。在一個全球化的世界裡，這個象徵還剩下什麼？如同時間一般，竹筏持續滑行，將一切帶往某個漂浮的他方，而那正是記憶之地。

這是林立施首次創作玻璃雕塑。作品源自她在馬賽Cirva駐村期間的實驗，在那裡她與玻璃工藝大師合作，探索各種材料運用方式。駐村計劃為期兩年，可多次逗留，讓藝術家理解這種新媒材特性，同時逐步發展創作項目。在這樣的背景下，林立施選擇以竹為材，一方面利用其空心結構吹製玻璃，另一方面則以玻璃重現竹子的形態。

《呼吸，器皿（I）》（2026年）正是這些實驗的成果。再次吸引參觀者注意的，是材料之間的對比：竹子的堅硬與不透明，對比玻璃的柔軟圓潤與透明，然而兩者的形態卻彷彿彼此擁抱、互為補足。作品呈現出一種飽滿而感性的質地，竹子彷彿孕育出玻璃氣泡，使這個異質元素在其中膨脹，開啟一個未知的空間。

竹子在林立施的創作中佔據特別位置。先是她家人於斯德哥爾摩與赫爾辛基開設的餐廳以竹命名，其後回流香港的叔叔開設的卡拉OK酒吧亦是以竹命名。除了個人層面的連結外，竹子亦是香港常見的材料，用於臨時搭建粵劇戲棚，也廣泛應用於城市景觀中的棚架結構。

在香港進行研究期間，林立施認識了白碧琪，她是在香港為數甚少的女性竹藝大師。她們一同以3D掃描的方式，記錄永樂街附近、鄰近林氏祖母住所的一座建築棚架，而白碧琪後來亦隨林立施前往馬賽。畫廊中散落的竹形玻璃雕塑，正是這段合作的成果。林立施最終沒有選擇完整重現棚架，而是採取碎片化的呈現方式。因此，在空間中可見玻璃竹節或臥或立，置於角落、獨立存在或彼此組合。它們共同構成一種本身不可見、卻可被感知的結構，再次喚起漂浮與變動的意象。柑橘也在其中悄然再現，彷彿同樣在移動，在這些新生成的景觀中綻放。

這些玻璃裝置為錄像作品《海上浮宮》（2024年）鋪陳了完美的引子。該錄像佔據另一展廳的整面牆，構成展覽的核心。錄像融合了林立施多年來掌握的多種技術，大部分內容以皮影戲的形式呈現，取材自她家族餐廳以及龍船的3D掃描，那艘龍船是她為威尼斯雙年展而掃描的。這些數碼空間亦構成她過往作品的背景，尤其是《異海傳説》（2023年）。雖然《海上浮宮》創作在後，但它可被視為前作的序章，我們亦再次見到前作的某些角色，例如龍的靈體。盧亭為香港的神話始祖，這一次，林立施希望透過盧亭的混合形象，更深入探討香港的歷史。然而，她更希望作品能超越本地的文化背景。為此，她邀請飾演盧亭的兩位演員Bruno Hibombo與Ivan Cheng，以各自的詮釋豐富神話。

事實上，合作元素正是林立施創作的一大特色。無論是技術、音樂或服裝，她都傾向與其他藝術家合作，令自身與歷史及記憶之間的關係更加複雜。例如在這錄像中，她與定居芬蘭的伊拉克藝術家克洛德．哈瓦什合作，由其設計靈感來自伊拉克與美索不達米亞神話中魚人形象的服裝。她採用了伊拉克手工被褥的傳統工藝，連接起盧亭與波斯民間傳說。

錄像在北歐景觀與水底場景之間游移，如同一場融合不同文化與時代的夢境。對林立施而言，參觀者無需追隨敘事，只需沉浸於詩意與情感的流動之中。海洋與深淵為藝術家提供了一個理想場域，讓夢境、現實、時間與地理重疊。流動的海水元素壓倒了構成場景的竹子與龍船，一方象徵掌控、秩序與世界的建構，另一方則象徵滑移、飄忽不定與變幻無常。錄像結尾，船隻沉沒。

展覽的最後一件裝置《世代（祖先）》/《世代（後裔）》（2026年）描繪成人與孩童並排而坐，兩人面向錄像，彷彿正在觀看。他們的身體透明，由發光霓虹燈構成。參觀者可看透兩人的身軀，而他們同時以奇異的藍色光暈瀰漫整個空間。文化的傳承，或許正存在於這種難以捉摸的光影之中。

林立施的創作如同一片流動的星圖，各種元素持續重構，並在彼此之間生成提問與張力。她試圖透過融合傳統與當代媒介，以及持續擴展合作，尋找一種能夠容納自身提問的藝術形式，為裂縫與多樣性保留空間。光是她創作的重點，而其對應的影亦然。這不禁令人聯想到稜鏡，透過光的折射產生多重角度，將現實的直線分裂為多條分歧的路徑，既帶來碎片，也帶來延展。

林立施的作品提醒我們：每一種文化、每一種身份，皆在他人的凝視中不斷被滋養，在每一次被觀看時重新轉化與展開。