Florence Lam (b.1992 Vancouver, Canada) is currently based in Hong Kong. Lam works with wonder and magical thinking, to fuse together current moral issues with child-like world views with performance art as the main medium of expression. She obtained her MA Fine Art from Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2017 and her BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2014. Lam has performed around Asia and Europe, including Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2022), Para Site (Hong Kong, 2021), Nanhai Gallery (Taipei, Taiwan 2019), Manifesta 11 (Zürich, Switzerland 2016) etc. Art festivals include Black Market International - Exploring 2021 (Frankfurt, Germany 2021), ZABIH Performance Festival (Lviv, Ukraine 2019) etc. She worked as a re-performer for 'The Cleaner' Retrospective of Marina Abramović at Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany (2018). She is the co-founder and co-curator of Per.Platform, Hong Kong-based live art platform founded in 2021.
In Your Shoes
In Your Shoes
In Your Shoes
Performance artist Florence and documentary filmmaker Tze Woon are lovers. They propose to exchange each other's distressing memories before they met and attempt to reenact each other's experience with their own art form—could they really walk closer towards each other through the process?
'Putting on his tattered shoes, even if it's ill-fitting on me, I tried to feel the shape of his feet imprinted on the sole, but I can't feel his body heat anymore. I rubbed to warm it up, to reenact that feeling again. I lifted the shoes up easily, despite them looking big and heavy, and I found him kneeling down, supporting the weight. I am not sure what he expects when he entrusts his memories to me, maybe none. No matter how real the moment I re-perform his memory, I can never really replicate the danger he endured at the time. For me, my memory is too persistent. If only I could hand it over to someone who can never fully understand, perhaps his interpretation may surprise me. Holding the pairs of worn-out shoes that we are reluctant to throw away, we will keep cherishing.
'However, I seemed to understand something when I tried to learn his creative language. Holding the worn-out shoes that we were reluctant to throw away, we embrace them with care.' - Florence LAM
'"As a man, how would you ever understand the unique experience of the female body?" Indeed, body and sexuality are fundamentally incomprehensible, so is creative expression. Florence and I hold a completely different view towards the truth, could we walk into each other's memory through our own creative medium? Despite being sceptical, at least we stepped into each other's shoes and tried to take one step forward.' - CHAN Tze Woon
A Hong Kong-based director and writer. His debut feature-length documentary Yellowing (2016) won the Shinsuke Ogawa Prize at the 2017 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Chan's second feature film Blue Island (2022), a hybrid film that blends documentary and memory reenactment, taking the audience on a journey through Hong Kong's past and present, and has won the Best International Documentary at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Chan has been experimenting with and creating images that blur the boundary between reality and fiction. His past works have been presented at International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival and Busan International Film Festival, etc.
