Walking, Glitching, and World-Building in Lap-See Lam’s Mother’s Tongue
Advised by Profs. Janet Kraynak and John Rajchman, Columbia University
0. Introduction
It was a wet January evening in Stockholm. Snow fell in relentless sheets, the ground too warm for it to settle. The pavements of Södermalm glistened beneath the glow of art bookstores, record stores, and curated vintage boutiques. “You have arrived at Bamboo Garden,” Google Maps whispered in my headphones.
The host guided me past emerald tiled-roof pavilions moonlighting as the bar and cash register, and seated me beside a wunderkammer of blue-and-white porcelain vases and Buddha statuettes. Replicas of ink paintings lined the walls. Next to me was a group of stylish Swedes, Tsingtao beers in hands, sharing Sichuanese and Cantonese dishes family-style.
I was born and raised in Beijing, but this mirage of Chineseness jolted me into a distant past that I never lived, oscillating between foreign and familiar.
As my body consumed, digested, absorbed, and assimilated the nutrients from the sweet and sour pork, I began to think about how these metabolic functions mirror the operations through which diaspora cultural identity is produced, deconstructed, signaled, and circulated.
Bamboo Garden was Lap-See Lam’s family business for almost five decades. Lam grew up amid the rhythms of her grandparents’ and parents’ labor, and this experience would later inform her artistic inquiry, particularly in Mother’s Tongue (2018), one of her earliest works, and the focus of my thesis.
This thesis argues that Lap-See Lam’s Mother’s Tongue unravels the construction, mediation, and performance of “Chineseness.” By examining Mother’s Tongue’s two iterations and its related projects through the lens of movement, glitch as method, and critical world-building, I establish that Lam’s work illuminates the interstitial space between the fictional and the real, memory and myth, to resist an essentialist logic underpinning cultural identity, thereby imagining a diasporic futurity unbound from inherited categories.