Music artist and composer Lucinda Chua will stage a live improvised performance, taking place within Lap-See Lam’s installation Floating Sea Palace. Combining cello with an array of effects units, Chua blends intimacy, atmosphere and haunting forms. 

Chua creates elemental landscapes that hold delicate songs. Born in London, Chua has English, Malaysian and ancestral Chinese roots, deep connections that are excavated in her recent album, YIAN (2023), which, as Pitchfork writes, “gathers the threads that link home, history, and their relationship to the body.” Having performed in unorthodox venues, from the depths of the planetarium to the top of a multi-story carpark at sunset, her cinematic performances bring the music to life, where she approaches the room and everyone in it as her instrument.

Lap-See Lam’s Floating Sea Palace addresses the translation – and mistranslation – of cultural heritage, exploring separation, generational loss and collective memory. Within the gallery, Lam has collaborated with sifu Ho Yeung Chan on a large-scale bamboo scaffold installation, utilising a building technique that has traditionally been employed to create elaborate temporary stages for Cantonese opera. Chua’s musical performance will respond to and inhabit this space, in a one-off concert during the exhibition's closing week.