Our relation to the past is always fickle, prone to slippage, lapse, and erasure. The more we try to summon a memory, the further it recedes, disassembling and reconfiguring itself, evading our painstaking attempts to retain, let alone restore it. This unstable cognitive process is acutely familiar to diasporic individuals, whose recollections of distant origins often dilute over time, giving way to the dull ache of absence. 

Stockholm-born artist Lap-See Lam has long been attuned to the elusive mechanisms of remembering (and, by extension, of forgetting) that uphold a multilateral identity. Through research-driven projects spanning various media, she traces her grandparents’ journey from Hong Kong to Sweden to recover narratives that inevitably fray through migration, leaving behind only residues or rifts. One of her latest sculptural installations, Bamboo, (Vertical II) (2026), reifies this slow attrition.