Jaffa Lam, Sailing

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present Sailing, Jaffa Lam’s first solo exhibition in Europe. The selection of large-scale and intimate installations demonstrates how the Hong Kong-based, multidisciplinary artist and educator invites her community to be part of the core of her art practice. The mixed media artworks, often made from recycled, reclaimed, or industrial materials, demonstrate her socially oriented approach in an evolving experiment to reveal the positive influence an artist can have in society.

Lam utilises the title to refer to the sailboat’s collective power, which functions as a symbiosis of elements—wind, rope, sail, and human strength—that may be harnessed by a group of people working together. Embedded within the exhibition’s metaphors and themes is an expression of how Lam positions her work: not outspoken, not on the frontline, but a quiet plea for those around her who don’t have a platform in society.

It is a peace she allowed herself when turning fifty: “I used to want to carry big stones no matter how difficult it was, but now I think that being able to gently put down heavy stones is also a kind of spiritual cultivation.” In her focal question of what artists can do for society, she reflects on potential influences and values while focussing on how “ordinary individuals and trivial things that have been marginalised by the passage of time in our society”.

Lam migrated from China’s Fujian province to Hong Kong in her early teens. She found herself in a city in transition. A bustling, fluid metropolis—with great prosperity due to the duty-free trade port and thriving textile industries—ballooned with real estate projects that came to dominate the streetscape. The socio-economic context then changed rapidly, with declining industries, mass emigration, and human work replaced by machines or relocation to cheaper locations.

Together with her mother and sister, Lam toiled in garment factories, dreamed of becoming an artist, and started her studies at the prestigious Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1993, “in which there was still a strong emphasis on the self”. A decade later, the 2003 SARS epidemic and societal changes led to the desire to align emotions with those of those around her, resulting in community-based art. But the idea of a dream, she says, remains ambiguous for a second-generation migrant: many parents push their children towards elite jobs. Personal fulfillment is an afterthought.

If anything, Lam wants to be a role model for students who want to become artists and are therefore not part of the upper middle class. She also aims to refocus attention on individuals who have been marginalised by the ravages of time but were once responsible for the flourishing of the city. It is a philosophy that led her to use discarded material, in reference to concepts of renewal and regeneration. At the same time, she’s aware of the rarity of crafts like woodcarving. Other outside constraints are manpower and space—in Fo Tan’s industrial area, where Lam works, a scarce commodity for an artist.

Since 2009, Lam has worked on her ongoing Micro Economy project in which she can try to bring change. This change has centred around people within the community who share a past, whom she understands, and to whom she can connect the heritage of the past to contemporary social realities. Together with those close to her—members of the Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association, stay-at-home mothers, people with a migrant background, and people who lost their jobs because of changing economic circumstances—she creates installations in a variety of materials and formats, always without limiting herself.

The artworks—which never have the finality of being beautiful, unlike some political consensuses—are not mass-produced: each figure has a meaning. Confidence in her community ensures no worries about intellectual property. Although she gets questions about how many people can benefit from her work and what the KPIs are, this is unimportant. What matters is her contribution. She seeks a wider viewpoint by focussing on the emotional values of her work and the impact created inside and outside her micro-economy. Lam examines the long-term repercussions, generation by generation, of how a small individual can ignite societal change. An individual’s action can set transformation in motion within a family, which reverberates within another and develops around a community, a country, and potentially, the world.
Lam recognised overlaps with Hong Kong when she was on a study visit to Antwerp. In both places, history flows through the veins of the street plan, largely defined by buildings that recall trade and labour from the past and present. This ensured that prosperity and migration went hand in hand. Today, much of the heritage that recalls these periods is being erased by real estate projects and gentrification: worker-inhabited zones in the port area gave way to revaluation projects.

However, Lam says, history remains tangible, which she demonstrates with the work Bleaching / Piu, an installation shown in 2018 at the Shouson Theatre, Hong Kong Arts Centre, and extended for this exhibition. “Piu” means both “bleach” and “drifting” in Cantonese: the space-filling installation is a metaphorical expression to evoke the spectator’s self-identity; to see what is underneath. The work is composed of used white fabrics that Lam collected in the Kwun Tong industrial district, a region that offered poorly paid work within the garment industry and where many migrants in the 1970s and 1980s, including Lam’s family, found refuge. Earlier this year, Lam expanded the work to include textiles found in second-hand shops in Antwerp suburbs, where, in the 1970-80s, migrant workers could find affordable rental housing: close to their work, which led Lam to select uniforms and workwear. Once back in Hong Kong, the whole was sewn together by female workers and the artist. In doing so, Lam ties the workers’ stories together like a patchwork. The work hovers from the

ceiling—to invite visitors to participate in Lam’s introspective world, experiencing the dilemma between the possible prosperity and flourishing of the future on the one hand, and the struggles of the present and melancholy of the past on the other.

Something else she metaphorically uses to describe herself, as a recurring element and motif in her artworks, is the Hong Kong Orchid. The flowering plants grow in a wide range of environments and have a very broad diversity, but whether they are native to Hong Kong is not known with certainty—presumably they got there “by accident”. Still, as of 1997, they are a symbol on the Hong Kong flag. “I am like Hong Kong Orchid,” Lam says. “Where do I come from? What do I want to symbolise?”

Following the official flag format, Lam is now making the Hybrid Peace series (consisting of four works in four respective colours, three of which to be shown at the Hong Kong Arts Centre next year) as a mosaic of reminiscence and a shared historical past. The flags are made of recycled umbrella fabric, recalling the peaceful protest happend in the city, though Lam used the material even before that, as a metaphor for protection and hyper-consumption: thousands are discarded per day, both rain and shine.

Lam’s umbrella textile works are ready to be folded up and tucked away after this exhibition, ready to travel with her in Lam’s nomadic existence. Even her heaviest works, concrete-worked trolleys, have the functionalities to be easily moved by pallet jack. But as long as they’re here, they are invitations to take a seat, rest, and experience a moment of respite. At least, if a comfortable place can be found. Lam embraces the imperfections as opposed to the perceived perfection of technology, AI, and VR. Above all, she says, her works are human.