Dear Shaded Viewers,
I had the pleasure to meet Lap-See Lam when she was one of the Jeunes Artists of Europe at the Fondation Cartier. Today I received a notice from Stockholm Galerie Nordenhake that Lap-See Lam was selected from over 11,700 entries from artists across 200 countries for the 6th edition of the Future Generation Art Prize. The final list includes 21 artists and artist collectives spanning five continents. The images above are from Fondation Cartier when we met.
An exhibition of the shortlisted artists will take place from October 2021 at PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv and then between May and August 2022 in Venice. The Prize will be awarded in December 2021.
The Future Generation Art Prize is a biannual global contemporary art prize to discover, recognize and give long-term support to a future generation of artists. Established by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in 2009, the Prize supported the artistic development and production of new works of over 100 artists in exhibitions at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv and as official collateral events at the Venice Biennale in 2011, 2013, and 2017.
All artists aged 35 or younger from anywhere in the world, working in any medium are invited to apply for the Prize. An outstanding selection committee, appointed by a distinguished international jury, reviews every application and nominates 20 artists for the short list. These artists will be commissioned to create new works that go on display at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv. Subsequently, all of them will present their works in the Future Generation Art Prize exhibition at the Venice Biennale.
Lap-See Lam’s art examines the ambiguity of identity and cultural constructs through an exploration, similar to archaeology of the history of the Chinese diaspora in Sweden. I was totally intrigued by the film that I had seen of her exhibition at Fondation Cartier that I went back the following day just to seek her out. The film was originally designed for a mobile phone application, Mother’s Tongue is a work produced in tandem with her cousin, the director Wingyee Wu. Using a 3D scanner, the artists have started out by recording the interior of several Chinese restaurants in Stockholm, at a time when many of them are about to disappear. This initial act of preservation is then fictionalized by way of a voice-over. Besides the ghost of the restaurants addressing the viewer from a future where artificial intelligence and robotics seem to have replaced the places and the people, monologues by three women are heard who have a history with these restaurants; three generations that successively evoke the cultural frictions, family-related, social as well as technological, that they are confronted with. Using specific stories, the film evokes the cultural reality of immigration and how it affects the construction of identity and otherness over time.
Lap-See Lam was born in 1990 and lives and works in Stockholm. All of the artists in Jeunes Artistes en Europe Les Metamorphoses were born from 1980-1994, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 21 artists were selected from 16 countries however the team from Fondation Cartier visited 29 countries and discovered over 200 artists selected from 1,000 portfolios.
curator: Thomas Delamarre, assisted by Sidney Gerard
Associate Curator: Leanne Sacramone, assisted by Sonia Digianantonio
Conservation Assistant: Beatriz Forti
Later,
Diane
