Florence Lam
HONG KONG
For 16 hours over the course of two days, Florence Lam crept along the floor under dim lights. She carried a car’s passenger seat on her back, and mimicking ancient cavemen, she carved and doodled on the fragments of broken vehicles that surrounded her. Part of the exhibition “Post-Human Narratives” at Hong Kong’s Cattle Depot Artist Village, her performance Heaven Spot (2021) imagines a postapocalyptic future where the industrial remains become the historical materials of future generations. Exhausted and emptied of thought during this long performance, Lam felt that she had merged with the mechanical parts.
This direct confrontation with objects began with her study of (2014), she sat in a chair with a microphone pointed at her chest to amplify her heartbeat. An attempt to critically reflect on the audience’s expectations, a looped recording declares: “I’m sitting still, as still as a sculpture/I’m showing you the bottom of my heart.” Similarly highlighting the artist’s body as a medium of performance is (2021–22), in which she maximizes the use of her mouth and vocal cords to create as many sounds as possible. While bodily percussion is often seen in communal folk traditions, by performing it independently, Lam tests the possibilities of sound-making.
