Nikki Lam (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is an artist-curator and filmmaker based in Narrm/Melbourne and Hong Kong. Lam’s work has been shown, published and screened widely across Australia and internationally. With an expanded practice, she is currently co-director of Hyphenated Projects, an artist-led network that nurtures practice in Asian diasporas and winner of Creative Australia’s Asia Pacific Arts Awards for Innovation in 2024. She co-runs Slow Burn Books, an art publisher and bookshop that circulates independent art publications across Asia-Pacific. Lam is a PhD (Art) candidate at RMIT University. Her practice-led PhD is about moving images in the Hong Kong Diaspora.
Nikki Lam Residency
Nikki Lam will be in residence at Studio Voltaire from August to September 2025.
Through a queer feminist lens, Lam investigates the slippages of memory, drawing from the oral stories of her Tanka elders and reimagined mythologies. Lam will reflect on the multiplicity of Hong Kong’s cultural and ecological histories, and extend her ongoing exploration of scent as a medium for storytelling, transformation and diasporic belonging.
Lam’s residency project, Elusive Dimensional Parfum, explores scent, memory and myth-making through the legend of Lo Ting, a deity believed to be the ancestral origin of the Tanka people in Hong Kong. The Tanka, historically referred to as ‘boat people,’ were denied access to land and education for generations, living on waterways along the shores of the Kowloon peninsula.
Central to Lam’s research is agarwood, also known as oud, a rare fragrant wood that once shaped Hong Kong's naming and trade history. The name ‘Hong Kong’ is a phonetic translation of 'Fragrant Harbour', referencing its role in farming and trading incense derived from this rare material.
During their residency, Lam will develop a new body of work that examines scent and materials that produce scent, as storytelling tools. Inspired by a combination of sci-fi narratives, feminist myth-making and oral history, she will frame Lo Ting as a figure who moves between human and spiritual realms through a portal of scent. Following her recent residency at Desa in Bali, where she studied traditional incense-making techniques, Lam will deepen her olfactory research to create a new participatory performance.
This residency is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria
- Nikki Lam, Reprise, 2023. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.
- Nikki Lam, The Unshakeable Destiny, 2023. Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Image courtesy of the artist. Credit Zan Wimberley
- Nikki Lam, The Unshakeable Destiny, 2023. Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Image courtesy of the artist. Credit Zan Wimberley