Join artist Lap-See Lam as she discusses her major commission Floating Sea Palace at Studio Voltaire with arts writer and editor Rebecca Liu.

Lam explores the experiences of Hong Kong Chinese communities in diaspora, often via the decor of Chinese restaurants in Western Europe. Describing how ‘the Chinese restaurant only occurs outside of China’, for Lam these sites are bound by ideas surrounding resilience, cultural hegemony and identity.

Floating Sea Palace continues a cycle of work inspired by the ‘dragon ship’ Sea Palace, a three-storey floating Chinese restaurant in the shape of a dragon. Commissioned by entrepreneur Johan Wang in the 1990s, the ship sailed from Shanghai, but after attempts to use the vessel as a floating Chinese restaurant failed, the Sea Palace later served as a haunted house at the Gröna Lund amusement park, where it was described as “A ship from the Orient with a thousand year curse”.

For Lam, the Sea Palace is a knotty and often contradictory subject matter, reflecting an exoticised image of China while expressing its own cultural affiliation. As a cultural in-between, the restaurant/ship/horror house becomes a space within which to explore ideas of separation and displacement; language and mistranslation; and generational loss.

Floating Sea Palace is Lam’s first institutional exhibition in the UK, and builds on the major work The Altersea Opera (2024), presented at the 60th International Venice Biennale.