![](https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=4096&h=2730&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=415ed1a0fd600ad91dd971267b77c23a 4096w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=3072&h=2047&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=71d89eda585badc62e8b6529c2696f9c 3072w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=2560&h=1706&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=e1faec0a6589aaa5a9c9326e6ec0158b 2560w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=2048&h=1365&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=ad087491bce9f09285531f2e09c2e77e 2048w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=1920&h=1279&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=7f470cdd6440638ba7c59e2dc41b0892 1920w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=1536&h=1023&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=3d4161bd2cdbc3e340bd7a9bb8a4295f 1536w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=1280&h=853&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=5abd0e3fb00ae2f7813a2d2c12fa4bbb 1280w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=1024&h=682&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=d6bf75346294942fc38b4bec92e7ed15 1024w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=768&h=511&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=8da7ef236027a40ba5cca45ca7389942 768w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=512&h=341&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=2d53148e31ee42ce3037538c04ded9a9 512w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=256&h=170&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=e0f5be37e9eb48d4db7a43b80d38a97d 256w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0004_Baggrund.jpg?w=128&h=85&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634121402&s=2006415d1a2279d61a36d61c3d87dad9 128w)
Lap-See Lam, Installation view, Bonniers Konsthall, 2018
Photo by Beata Cervin. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake
The metaphor of a ‘mother tongue’ refers to the utterance of a speaker in their native language—words belonging to the code of systems that verbalize reality practiced since birth. A ‘slip of the tongue’ (parapraxis) reveals a hidden desire. To speak in many of them (glossolalia) is an experience of religious ecstasy or delirium. If stolen by a cat, you are inexplicably silent. In expressions, the tongue is the muscle responsible for communicating symbols of understanding.
For Swedish artist Lap-See Lam (b. 1990) her lingua franca is articulated in images that interpret the aesthetic of a Cantonese diaspora in the context of her native Europe. In recent exhibitions, the emblem of the Chinese restaurant has been her subject. The evolution of Mother’s Tongue, Lam’s collaborative work with film director Wingyee Wu (b. Stockholm, 1976), was originally commissioned in 2017 and has developed in six iterations over the past four years including installations at the Moderna Museet Malmö (Sweden, 2018), Performa 19 (New York, 2019), and most recently Trondheim Kunstmuseum (Norway, 2021), among others. Initially developed as an interactive app [1], the work unfolds in three distinct fictional accounts—past (1978), present (2018), and future (2058)—over the course of a walking tour across disparate sites in Stockholm. The narrative is told through the voices of intergenerational women—grandmother, mother, daughter—against the backdrop of a virtual reality animation. Visited by spirits, like the three fates, the storytelling structure of Mother’s Tongue mirrors a type of mythic thinking born of Lam’s own history (her family owned and operated the Bamboo Garden in Stockholm) and extends toward a more encompassing vision of how remnants of alterity come to define culture.
[1] Commissioned by the non-profit public art association Mossutställningar, developed by Appster.
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Lap-See Lam, Mother's Tongue, Installation view, 2018
Photo by Vigfús Birgirsson / Cycle & Art Festival. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake
As the monologues track, the screens of our smartphones pan across the ritual of rooms that constitute all restaurants (the hostess booth, dining room, pass through kitchen, inventory storage) alongside the specificity of an aesthetic marketed toward the illusion of transporting the Western customer to an elsewhere they expect reflects Chinese cuisine. Pagoda roof tiles indoors, horseshoe-backed chairs, red lacquer panels upon the walls, jade hued cloth napkins, casts of foo dog statuary—combinations of kitsch that exaggerate notions of place. Yet here, they are only pictured in partial view; composed entirely of 3D scans, the same device often used in forensics or archeology, we only see what the laser can touch as the artist moves through the spaces. The interiors are incomplete facsimiles of real locations throughout Stockholm; establishments such as New Peking City and Ming Garden, whose nomenclature is typical of the Chinese restaurant genre, elicits a type of fortification or paradise. Though recognizable, what we can see is equally defined by the gaps, glitches, and holes of what we cannot. While we stand still, our gaze involuntarily moves through the quarters as if we are acting witness to an underwater voyage, discovering either the remnants of a shipwreck or Atlantis, or a specter observing life on earth from another realm.
The double ghost nature of the work—adopting the visual language of haunting in order to point to the phantoms of history and culture that define the diaspora experience—dwells within its variations. Like language, the materiality of objects and locales that Mother’s Tongue pictures are often lost in translation. Or perhaps, they mutate. In Phantom Banquet (2019-2020), Lam’s recent solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake in Stockholm, a circular white clothed table is surrounded by a set of slipcovered chairs as if staged for a séance. Each participant of the work—the viewer that elects to sit—is adorned with a VR headset that enacts a scene of a young girl (you become her) who disappears through the void of a mirror into another dimension. When the work functions at full capacity, heads at the table stare out into space but face into the screen.
![](https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=3072&h=1973&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=66d14926dd747d6494c146dea840c4a8 3072w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=2560&h=1644&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=d628b78aa52ecc18a6e44faa757ba548 2560w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=2048&h=1315&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=1209f86f9f41454dfe9e38d496ba4067 2048w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=1920&h=1233&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=804df8df7c37b5a7baa142cf0e6cdcfb 1920w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=1536&h=986&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=6acdd8261d0cc9a4cba4d11445689cf4 1536w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=1280&h=822&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=8d3d9bddf998168627bcafd45747fa8a 1280w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=1024&h=657&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=6a183d19feac49b0d5da0443fe2bc656 1024w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=768&h=493&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=88be1bdb06fe979d716143a48c9397e4 768w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=512&h=328&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=8a70d98e8df4ade65fcd3a450d63e24b 512w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=256&h=164&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=caff9f26d96045b2d85af511c815ee86 256w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/image_processing20210113-4-5wjr7i-copy.jpg?w=128&h=82&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1637921743&s=d3d5dee2e97fd8271ebd6c228889d774 128w)
Lap-See Lam, Phantom Banquet, 2019-2020, Installation view at Galerie Nordenhake
Photo Carl Henrik Tillberg, courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake
![](https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Screenshot-2021-10-13-at-15.31.04.png?w=2048&h=1318&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634200738&s=67a29c74c0635077523ca30a160984d7 2048w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Screenshot-2021-10-13-at-15.31.04.png?w=1920&h=1236&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634200738&s=52f091fcea740328ef302349e31d1332 1920w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Screenshot-2021-10-13-at-15.31.04.png?w=1536&h=989&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634200738&s=fe97ee2088a26d654c0026865e8a2792 1536w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Screenshot-2021-10-13-at-15.31.04.png?w=1280&h=824&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634200738&s=7a1b05e4087342e02437193ee912c00d 1280w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Screenshot-2021-10-13-at-15.31.04.png?w=1024&h=659&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634200738&s=753f41bff2996e2a0963785324c071b1 1024w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Screenshot-2021-10-13-at-15.31.04.png?w=768&h=494&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634200738&s=0a7658bdd8881b7d0c31db7268857e99 768w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Screenshot-2021-10-13-at-15.31.04.png?w=512&h=329&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634200738&s=4c3d8ff0918d520b9877969fb3563362 512w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Screenshot-2021-10-13-at-15.31.04.png?w=256&h=164&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634200738&s=fb2c56948bc43d5f42719d64d4bfbd71 256w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/Journal/Screenshot-2021-10-13-at-15.31.04.png?w=128&h=82&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634200738&s=23eae5565ddab043150649805c161b08 128w)
Lap-See Lam, Phantom Banquet, 2019-2020, Installation view at CHART 2021
Photo Niklas Vindelev
“Prophecy. As in true. As in Cassandra, speaking from the solitude of her cell. As in a woman’s voice. The future falls from her lips in the present, each thing exactly as it will happen, and it is her fate to never be believed.”
The Invention of Solitude, 1982
![](https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=4096&h=2730&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=c9a501809c1fdcc48c376ecfef2eb8f0 4096w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=3072&h=2047&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=4e2fd4997dfa8bbfb9018d498d22c35a 3072w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=2560&h=1706&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=1161c61ac99d922c7020e9be72737402 2560w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=2048&h=1365&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=7bfa1eb2dce16f8990014eb5b86ac494 2048w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=1920&h=1279&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=a6a1162659c888b0a7ef02f4e80440a2 1920w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=1536&h=1023&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=6a74783d575d491f1df2376adde9a62b 1536w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=1280&h=853&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=9c45d70773a553a34f28906c48034484 1280w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=1024&h=682&q=82&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=0a683f3d4f0b094a48e67110f0a7dfdf 1024w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=768&h=511&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=706a2a2a8df7f38f18b49e4f0cca34c1 768w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=512&h=341&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=8588a111aa21b4c4bf2bcb8f3d26f89b 512w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=256&h=170&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=a0067cc158a608fc12b6b108d6695f7a 256w, https://optimise2.assets-servd.host/fluffy-tenrec/production/horisontal_0000_Photo-Peter-Hansen.jpg?w=128&h=85&q=60&fm=jpg&fit=crop&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1634122095&s=1ecf6bf9fd1910aa0002e84124a87547 128w)
Lap-See Lam, Horizontal Landscape, Vertical Ghost (part 1), Installation view, 2019
Photo by Peter Hansen. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake
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Lap-See Lam, Horizontal Landscape, Vertical Ghost (part 1), detail, 2019
Photo by Peter Hansen. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake
Returning to my home in Chicago after viewing the work at CHART in Copenhagen, I search my bookshelf for a copy of Paul Auster’s memoir The Invention of Solitude, published following the death of the author’s father. On its cover, there is a photograph: “There are several of him sitting around a table, each image shot from a different angle, so that at first you think it must be a group of several different men…and then, as you study the picture, you begin to realize that all these men are the same man…Each one is condemned to go on staring into space, as if under the gaze of others, but seeing nothing, never able to see anything. It is a picture of death, a portrait of an invisible man.” [2] I am reminded of one underlined passage, flipping through the pages I find: “Prophecy. As in true. As in Cassandra, speaking from the solitude of her cell. As in a woman’s voice. The future falls from her lips in the present, each thing exactly as it will happen, and it is her fate to never be believed.” [3] That Lam’s soothsayers are female narrators is significant. Each of them functions like a figure of Cassandra—the cursed goddess—heard, but unbelieved, they utter truths of what we know but refuse to listen to. “Parts of me are so displaced, that displacement has become my sense of being,” [4] says one woman (ghost of past). We hear the girl (ghost of present) called ‘banana kid’ by a member of her family followed by the subtitle: “Auntie explained that banana kids have yellow skin and a white heart.” [5] “Choose a language in the menu if your mother hasn’t taught you Cantonese,” says the future voice, “I hope you’ll want to listen to what I have to tell.” [6] Languages, like people, die too. The promise of the future remains that technology will advance enough that we can recover our mother’s tongue—just as easily as one restores the factory settings of a device.
Yet, it is the slippages of language and translation that Lam dramatizes throughout the dialogue of her works. The shadow cast by misinterpretation so familiar to first-generation children. “Mom with her Chinese and poor Swedish. Me with my Swedish and poor Chinese,” says the girl, an autobiographical avatar of the artist. Rimbaud, in his native French, writes in a purposefully incorrect grammar “Je est un autre,” (the proper conjugation would be je suis) and yet we comprehend the phrase more perfectly. Otherness always articulates, and therefore exists as, an improper nature. The error enacts a concrete poetry. In the context of Lam’s mother tongue, an English title that adopts a gender-specific term for a universal concept in the possessive, we are reminded that there is no such thing as the ‘other’ inside the womb.
[2] Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude. Penguin, 1982. (31)
[3] Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude. (127)
[4] Lap-See Lam and Wingyee Wu, Mother’s Tongue. App Store, developed 2018. From the chapter “Miss China.”
[5] Lap-See Lam and Wingyee Wu, Mother’s Tongue. From the chapter “Peach Tongue.”
[6] Lap-See Lam and Wingyee Wu, Mother’s Tongue. “Cyborg World.”
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Lap-See Lam, Phantom Banquet at Galerie Nordenhake, installation view, 2020
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake
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Stephanie Cristello is a contemporary art critic, curator, and author based in Chicago, IL. Her work focuses on artists who critically engage with the image and its role in visual culture. Through the lens of Classics and mythology, her diachronic writing practice concentrates on the intersection of ancient narratives and conceptual practice post-1960. Her research is specifically motivated by contemporary works that interrogate how language, text, and the use of poetic devices influence and shape the cultural and historical structures that surround us. She has worked internationally across a variety of platforms, including exhibitions, panels and symposia, editorial and publishing, and has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues nationally and internationally.
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Lap-See Lam (b. 1990), Stockholm. She has a major upcoming solo exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall opening 9th February 2022. Solo exhibitions include Skellefteå Konsthall, Skellefteå (2019); Moderna Museet Malmö (2018–2019); and Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2018). Lam is a recipient of the Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation Grant (2017).