The Unopened Books
Exhibition view: The Unopened Books | June 12 - September 1, 2023 | Arion Press, San Francisco, U.S.A.
At Arion Press’s Presidio workshop, where each book is crafted by hand, the selection of works in this pop-up exhibition range from drawings, prints to video and found objects, and reflect the artist’s experiences during the social turbulence in Hong Kong during 2019, followed by the covid-19 pandemic.
“I could only read and make some simple drawings in that difficult time.”
Across the various works, Lam takes the form of the book as a metaphor on how one reads the ‘un-opened’, or hidden part of oneself while experiencing drastic social change. As he navigates this period of introspection, figures appear within his signature landscapes, as if Lam is observing his own psyches up close.
A day of two Suns《一日兩天》
A day of two Suns《一日兩天》(2019) | Exhibition view: Memento: Jayashree Chakravarty and Lam Tung Pang (March 1, 2021 - June 6, 2022) | Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, U.S.A.
“I always insist on leaving the mark of the installers and technicians who help set up the piece. When I showed the work in Shanghai there were a lot of workers who helped me put up that piece (The Shadow Never Lies, Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum, 29 April–31 July 2016). They were trying to be very careful, measuring everything and holding the papers straight, so they clipped all these different things on the paper. When I looked at how they set up the paper, I found in all their touches a temporary structure, such as the taping, which they thought was just to measure the work. It’s similar to the bamboo scaffolding around the buildings in Hong Kong, I think that’s beautiful, unsettling—it doesn’t exist for long, it’s just temporary, but I think that’s the most beautiful part.”
- Lam Tung Pang
The Great Escape《大逃亡》
“[The Great Escape] explores the idea of retreat into nature. The body is in lockdown, but the mind is somewhere else… This work contains many secrets”
– Foong Ping, Curator, Beyond the Mountain
The Great Escape 大逃亡 (2020) | Kinetic video projection, ink and pencil on paper, scale models, fabric, wooden structure, acrylic and UV-print on plywood | Overall: 242.2cm x 372.5cm x 325cm | Exhibition view: Beyond the Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms (July 22, 2022 - June 30, 2023) | Seattle Asian Art Museum, U.S.A.
When the pandemic broke out, Lam Tung Pang, like many of us, spent most of his time trapped at home. Here, surrounded by plywood landscape imagery and video projected on the walls of a six-sided “lantern,” a scale-model home suggests a mountain retreat. This work evokes both cultural and personal notions of escape: Chinese eremitic traditions of retreat into transcendent nature, the escapism of adults reading children’s books, Lam himself fidgeting as a child in movie theaters wanting to get outside. Lam made these connections as he learned about Harry Houdini, master of daring escapes, from writings by avant-garde Japanese poet and filmmaker Shūji Terayama (1935–1983) on magic and illusion.
Wavy Weaving Wall《跡織繪》
Spanning the 4m x 23m wall of The Park, Lam Tung Pang and COLLECTIVE's Wavy Weaving Wall takes inspiration from Hong Kong’s textile industrial history and the myriad stories of different individuals’ personal memories of a special piece of fabric in their lives. Mimicking fabric movements, the Wavy Weaving Wall welcomes visitors to listen to recorded personal stories from the community and be part of the continuous shaping of the artwork through regular interactive hands-on workshops.
Wavy Weaving Wall《跡織繪》(2018) | UV printed on aluminium | 400cm x 2500cm | Location: CHAT The Mills, 45 Pak Tin Par Street, Tsuen Wan, N.T., Hong Kong
The Making of Wavy Weaving Wall: Lam Tung Pang x COLLECTIVE, 2018 | CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Art and Textiles), Hong Kong
Guest Room Theater《客房劇場》
Installation view: Guest Room Theater《客房劇場》| March 24-29, 2026 | Apartment in Wan Chai, Hong Kong
Lam Tung Pang’s Guest Room Theater was first conceived in 2015 as part of Curiosity Box (Hong Kong) – Hometown Tourist, which began as a month-long experiment in estrangement. Leaving his home in Sha Tin, he checked into a Wan Chai love hotel and wandered Hong Kong as a “tourist.” Maps and itineraries traced the unsettling truth: if Hong Kong is “our city,” it is also a city we scarcely know. “Being a guest” was not simply role-play but a critique of belonging under conditions of alienation.
By 2026, the metaphor becomes reality. Lam returns from self-exile in Vancouver to a city transformed by political rupture, inhabiting Hong Kong as a literal “guest.” The guest room is no longer a stage but his dwelling, a liminal site between public and private where memory collides with displacement and hope.
Saan Dung Gei《山洞記》
On November 2, 2018, Lam took the recently inaugurated high-speed railway from Hong Kong to Beijing. During the eight-hour journey, there was a 20-minute ride through a dark tunnel in Hong Kong’s territory. On this brief ride through the black hollow, Lam’s usual optimism yielded to a magical realist vision of anxiety and social unrest that gave birth to the title of this work – Saan Dung Gei – which literally translates to “the mountain hole notes.”
Conceived as a visual reader and a long-form novel, Saan Dung Gei consists of non-linear chapters that describe the allegorical journey of an itinerant traveler, “Eye”, who searched for, discovered and lost an anonymous novel’s manuscript. The exhibition features works made in 2018-2019, with which Lam challenges his own medium and creates a three-dimensional medley of paintings, installations, video sculptures, kinetic projection, and found objects.
Saan Dung Gei Turns《山洞記轉》(2019), detail | Exhibition view: Saan Dung Gei (March 26 - May 11, 2019), Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong