HALEY CLOUSER
CURATOR | WRITER



Lap-See Lam: Phantom Banquet


Stockholm-based artist Lap-See Lam explores shifts in Hong Kong Chinese visual culture across generations and geographies through the history of Sweden’s Chinese restaurants. Following an earlier attempt to archive her family’s former restaurant, Lam translates digital scans of Chinese eateries across Sweden, turning their composites into 3D-printed furniture and a virtual reality experience. Indistinct yet familiar, her reconstructions reveal a shared design language encoded with intergenerational communal memory and Western fetishizations of the East, exposing these spaces’ charged negotiations of the real and remembered, tradition and stereotype.

Narrated by a disembodied voice, the VR simulation journeys through a disintegrating dining room haunted by spectral figures, drawing on magical realism to conjure the past to the present. Lam’s glitchy tables and chairs — furniture subjected to the digital phenomenon of “generation loss,” or the corruption of data from migration across incompatible software — serve as metaphors for how diaspora transforms culture through time and space. Altogether, Phantom Banquet positions the Westernized Chinese restaurant as a collection of inherited and imposed memory where Hong Kong diasporic identity is reflected and constructed.


SCAD Museum of Art
Experimental Gallery
Savannah, GA
08/03/2026 - 01/11/2027



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