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 ceremitic 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.

This kinetic installation relays constantly shifting perspectives. The viewer can choose multiple vantage points, including places where light escapes from the lantern and makes our own shadow a part of the scene. Lam says this work allows one “to express dissatisfaction with some existing constraint. It helps you make a space to express that feeling in your own fashion, and to break through.”