A performance artist active in Hong Kong since 2020, Florence Lam has become a leading figure in experimental live art. She co-founded Per.Platform in 2021 to develop programs with other artists in the city, and this year Tai Kwun Contemporary invited Per.Platform and Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong (CMHK) to co-organize the HICCUP festival of sound art and performance art, which featured artists from Taipei, Chongqing, Bangkok, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. On December 7, Lam performed her own work Implantation (2022/24) at the one-day symposium “Avant-Garde: Performing for the Camera” held at M+ in Hong Kong. AAP caught up with Lam to ask about her projects.

In Implantation you carry a CRT (cathode-ray tube) television. Can you tell us about how your performance relates to the imagery on screen?

When I first performed Implantation in 2022 it was part of “Nothing Has Happened,” a dual exhibition with filmmaker Chan Tze Woon, curated by Emilie Choi Sin Yi at HART Haus. Tze Woon prepared archival video footage of Hong Kong in the 1960s, and from his childhood. I executed the live action, which was originally a five-hour-long, durational piece. We were thinking about the tangibility of memory and the weight of history quite directly. An old-style CRT television holds a certain weight; it has a very rigid form. I positioned my body around this big, heavy object to create as many postures as possible. At the time, I was interested in how the human body can transform itself around things that are hard and difficult to change in shape. There were many gestures related to embracing or carrying something in front of my belly, which in turn connected to the power of creativity that the so-called “fertile” female body generates.