LONDON — Within the early Nineties, a Shanghai entrepreneur commissioned a three-story ship embellished with a glut of Cantonese-style carvings and topped with a large dragon head. Designed as a floating Chinese language restaurant — a phenomenon that solely exists exterior of China — the ship was sailed to Europe and docked in a meandering sequence of port cities. After years of restaurant service, it was towed to the Gröna Lund amusement park in Stockholm, Sweden, the place it was repurposed as a funhouse. It was finally closed and fell into spoil, haunted by its cultural legacy and its many lives.
This ship, the Floating Sea Palace, is the inspiration and setting for artist Lap-See Lam’s new movie set up on view at Studio Voltaire, a part of a cycle of items developed from her solo presentation on the Venice Biennale’s Nordic Pavilion. For Lam, whose work explores Hong Kong Chinese language diasporic id, emigration, and intergenerational loss, the Floating Sea Palace encapsulates the contradictions inherent in these points: Like many Chinese language eating places in Western nations, the ship represents a commercialized exoticization of Chinese language tradition whereas additionally bearing witness to a posh, shared id.
Taking its title from the ship itself, Lam’s movie is projected onto a translucent display screen stretched throughout a bamboo scaffold construction that envelops the exhibition house, impressed by the flowery momentary constructions constructed to stage Cantonese operas. Guests enter behind the display screen, which means they initially expertise the movie as a wash of sound, mild, and flashes of mirrored pictures. It’s an appropriately disorienting introduction to a piece that revels within the contradictions and multiplicities of diasporic id, centering on the character of Lo Ting, a human-fish hybrid who’s the folkloric ancestor of the individuals of Hong Kong.
All through the movie, the characters sporadically repeat the phrase “start once more” in each English and Cantonese, prompting the retelling of their tales or new iterations of beforehand seen visible materials. As a storm begins to interrupt up the ship, the clips and voiceovers change into more and more jumbled. There’s a cyclical narrative at play, one which degrades but in addition turns into richer with every retelling, echoing the methods during which the ship has repeatedly been repurposed. Although ostensibly much less grand with every new id, its culturally symbolic energy has solely grown.
Lam filmed a lot of the piece on board the ship’s construction, dwelling on its newest iteration as a haunted home fairground attraction, the place its house owners overtly drew on dangerous racial stereotypes to promote it as “a ship from the Orient with a thousand-year curse.” The artist performs with the thought of haunting all through the movie, from low cost fairground methods and the lazy typecasting that reverberates by means of Western representations of Chinese language tradition to notions of intergenerational id, collective reminiscence, and the retracing of migratory routes. As one of many characters within the movie places it, “the ship creaks with the pressure of its personal hauntology.”
The Floating Sea Palace by no means reaches its vacation spot, as a substitute left to climate literal and metaphorical storms. Like many members of diasporic communities, it’s unmoored and adrift, carrying the cargo of its homeland into new territories. Lam means that such dislocation inevitably leads to mistranslation; however whereas it may be isolating, it additionally holds wealthy potential for brand spanking new expression.
Lap-See Lam: Floating Sea Palace continues at Studio Voltaire (1A Nelsons Row, London, United Kingdom) by means of December 15. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.