CREATING ACROSS CULTURES
Under Cheung’s tutelage, Lam found that she liked working with wood, tools and fabrication and that, despite her petite build, she was good at wielding large tools and machinery. The freedom of working in more contemporary idioms also appealed to her. She began incorporating a more conceptual approach in her calligraphic works. In her 1996 piece Black Tiger she used an ancient calligraphic script to copy out the contents of a recent newspaper article on the construction of Hong Kong’s Tsing Ma Bridge, the world’s largest suspension bridge. There was a social and political subtext to this work: with the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong to mainland China looming ahead, the construction of the Tsing Ma bridge represented the inexorable future of an infrastructural linkage between Hong Kong and mainland China—a development that was in equal parts welcomed and resisted among Hong Kong people. Jaffa’s Black Tiger received a major award at the 1996 Hong Kong Art Biennale and was collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Then her trajectory shifted once more: she began to pursue sculpture, installation and mixed media.
Cheung Yee and Lam in front of Lam’s calligraphic artwork Black Tiger (1996).
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