Mother’s Tongue has several iterations, and the same 3D scans of Chinese restaurants used as a source for Mother’s Tongue have been reworked in other creative projects. The recent 2020 exhibition Phantom Banquet at Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, included an immersive virtual reality work as well as sculptural objects. The objects—archeological, speculative—are ghostly fragments of Chinese restaurant décor assembled from 3D scans using a process similar to archeological and forensic reconstructions.
In this interview, Lap-See Lam discusses her interest in documenting Stockholm’s Chinese restaurants, her fascination with the immateriality and negative space of 3D laser scanning, and her creative exploitation of the vulnerabilities of the scanner to errors and glitches.
Let me start by asking you about Mother’s Tongue. This project began as a smartphone app, and that’s the iteration I know, so all my questions are based on the app. Could you speak to how this project developed?
Mother’s Tongue, in the first iteration, was commissioned by Mossutställningar in 2017 within their newly initiated project Stockholm Beyond the Surface. The framework was to question traditional forms of public art and to explore in what other ways we can use public interactivity to present untold or forgotten stories in our city.
I invited Wingyee Wu, a filmmaker and a relative of mine, to collaborate on this idea and to combine our different experiences within the fields of art and filmmaking. Piece by piece, the work emerged into a cinematic story where the audience are invited to discover a familiar but hidden part of the city: the Chinese restaurant, and the stories it tells. The app plays with the format of tourist guide apps but with the restaurant itself as a guide and narrator.
Mother’s Tongue was made in close collaboration with the producer Mossutställningar, graphic designer Thomas Bush, app designer Andreas Palmerén, sound composer Max Stenerudh, and the voice actors Yuk-Lin Lam, Emmie Chau, and Sofie Wu. And last but not least, Irene Ng, Chao Wang, and Julianne Chum, who gave me permission to scan their workplaces in 2015. Today, Mother’s Tongue also exists as a video installation.
I understand you were 3D-scanning restaurants in Stockholm, many of which were closing. How did you get the idea to use 3D scanning technology to construct imaginary spaces?
In 2014, my parents retired and sold their restaurant in Stockholm, which my grandmother and her brother opened in 1978. I felt an urgent need to document the place and borrowed a 3D laser scanner from the architectural department at the art school. I had almost no experience of 3D scanning but was curious and drawn to the technology due to its use within archeology, architecture, and forensic investigations. The technique itself, where the machine measures the distance between the object and the scanner with illuminated light, also spoke to me as it talked about immateriality and negative space. But the new proprietor was hesitant to let me scan the space. Instead, I turned to other similar restaurants and this then grew into an archive of scans collected during a year.
My initial idea was to make hyper-realistic renderings of these spaces, but the scanner missed a lot of information, created “glitches” in the images, and I also had to convert the data in the computer to be able to work the heavy material. So, in post-production, the material behaved unexpectedly and created a ruin-like expression. Inevitably I started to associate the images with shipwrecks, traces from fires, and dream sequences—the realistic image was not interesting anymore. That was not intentional but something that I chose to keep. The material and the generational loss gave me a visual language to work with and to think through. This material has been the source of almost all my works, such as Oriental Travesty (2016), Mother’s Tongue (2018), Beyond Between (2019), and Phantom Banquet (2019–2020).
Mother’s Tongue is not only a fantastical hyper-real journey through Chinese restaurant spaces, but it is also a fictional narrative told in the voice of the Chinese restaurant. Where did this voice come from? Is it at all autobiographical, based on your family? Or did you conduct interviews with restaurant owners?
The story is divided into three chapters set in the past, present, and future through fictional monologues led by three generations of women. All three women reflect on someone who’s in some way “foreign” to them. In “Peach Tongue” (set in 1978), a daughter reflects on the relationship with her mother; in “Miss China” (set in 2018), a former Cantonese restaurant proprietor talks about the restaurant’s new proprietor, a mainland Chinese woman; and in “Cyborg World” (set in 2058), a grandmother records a voice message to her possible future grandchild. These stories are not only about the history of Chinese restaurants in Sweden, but also stories about human relations, community, language, othering, and mortality. We created these characters so, no, they’re not autobiographical nor based entirely on my family. The idea of using the restaurant’s own voice came from a need to problematize ideas of representation.
Your virtual restaurants are convincing and cinematic, but there are many moments when architectural details break apart and float free of structure—the effect is sci-fi-ish and dystopic. The project does stage a kind of time travel. Can you talk about how you are playing around with relationships of space and time?
In Mother’s Tongue, the idea of time travel gave us an opportunity to control the perception of the present existing place from a broader perspective by telling the story through the beginning, through change, and to a speculative end of the Chinese restaurant in Sweden as a historic phenomenon. The time span is eighty years, like human life from birth to death. With the app as a tool, we had the possibility to play with different levels of orientation and to break the linear time perspective. You visit a place that no longer exists, guided by a future voice, in this real-time moment. Here, the viewer orientates themselves in a city that the narrative simultaneously redraws.
In Phantom Banquet, I wanted to dig deeper into ideas of the third space. In this work, which exists both as a performance and an installation, we follow a teenage girl who disappears through a mirror into another dimension. Using narrative storytelling, VR, sculpture, sound, and live music, we're transported through portal after portal until the Chinese restaurant, as we recognize it, dissolves and becomes its own space—perhaps a third space. The viewer experiences the girl's transition between the worlds: you float out through the mirror into a restaurant populated by threadlike ghost figures, out into a dark universe where other restaurants float around. Like a graveyard of closed restaurants or a physical space for our collective memory. One can compare the format of the story with a funnel: it starts small but grows larger and larger during the ten minutes we experience the 360° film.
The sculpture Phantom Banquet Ghost also relates to this question but plays with the relationship of space and time a bit differently. The neon figure is based on fragments of people accidentally captured in the 3D scans of the restaurants. It could be the passing motion of a waiter or a guest that the laser scanner registered. This was also unintentional and something I discovered in post-production, and I thought it was quite beautifully translated into materialized time and movement.
How has using 3D laser scanning influenced your work with “real” objects in the physical space of a gallery or museum?
My work is always physical in the sense that it results in all-encompassing installations. One idea can develop into many different lives, including animation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Old works may also reappear in new projects, if they add something or make sense to the narrative. I try not to define the lifespan of works too much.
The 3D scans have become a source of my work that is constantly being redefined. A format I use to keep this world as open as possible is a real time engine motor which I use to build up worlds, sometimes for physical spaces of galleries and art spaces. Using this program, I can also store digital versions of my previous works, available to put in new contexts.
