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‘We will create a vibrant arts scene’

By Sophie Hastings

Pearl Lam is finally opening a gallery in her native Hong Kong. She

explains why it has taken her so long

��I define Chinese contemporary art as the reinvention of tradition, reacting to and

embracing western tradition too, and creating a new form of expression, a new visual

language,” says Pearl Lam, on the eve of the inaugural exhibition at her eponymous Hong

Kong gallery.

Lam’s return to her native Hong Kong is a significant move. With a fine art gallery, a

design gallery and a project space in Shanghai, an arts foundation based in New York and

an apartment in which she exercises her formidable networking skills on London’s Savile

Row, she has been exhibiting Chinese contemporary art and international design for nearly

two decades (much of it at her Contrasts Gallery, last year renamed the Pearl Lam

Galleries). She left Hong Kong partly because there was no audience for such work. Her

2005 exhibition of French designer Andr��e Putman, for example, which was shown first in

Shanghai to crowds of visitors, drew “only a handful” when it transferred to Hong Kong’s

Design Centre.

Lam’s homecoming is testament to Hong Kong’s recent

metamorphosis from cultural wasteland to hub of the Asian

contemporary art scene, ignited by the success of Hong Kong International Art Fair, the

influx of western galleries and the creation of the West Kowloon Cultural District and the

M+ contemporary art museum.

Lam grew up with traditionally minded parents for whom art is “a hobby not a career”.

Neither her father, a property tycoon, nor her mother had any experience of art, collecting

or contemporary culture. In her younger days Lam cut a flamboyant, couture-clad figure in

Hong Kong, known for leaving parties through kitchen windows to escape the paparazzi.

One of the first generation of affluent Chinese children to be educated in the west, her

interest in art began overseas. “I bought horrible things from graduate shows,” she

remembers.

She returned to her family with a dream of opening a gallery. “It was not acceptable. They

didn’t approve of me studying abroad for 10 years only to become a shopkeeper. We have

no tradition of galleries in China and they didn’t understand. I was sent to Shanghai to help

on a property development project. My parents thought I was too wild and needed calming

down. But I negotiated the possibility of doing some pop-up shows.”

The young Chinese artists whom Lam met in Shanghai in the early 1990s had a lifechanging

influence. “They were talking about Confucius, Daoism, Buddhism,” she recalls.

“I was amazed, it seemed so old fashioned; I thought of contemporary art in terms of

western street culture. But of course, this kind of discussion had been banned during the

Cultural Revolution and to talk about these things was subversive and cool. No one was

reading this material in Hong Kong. I learnt how to be Chinese.”

As well as funding an artist-in-residence programme for western and Asian designers, and

sponsoring exhibitions of western art in China, Lam curated shows looking at Chinese

traditions from ink painting and calligraphy to furniture, asking contemporary western

and Chinese artists to respond to ancient practice.

“I didn’t want to show just art or just design, I wanted to make shows about living with

art,” she says. She was concerned that China had lost much of its heritage, expressing

shock when parts of the Forbidden City were repainted with red paint instead of lacquer

and condemning the gaudy palaces of the nouveaux riches as “mini Versailles”. But she was

also infuriated when western critics accused Chinese contemporary art of being derivative.

“Yes, Chinese pop art was shallow, feeding the west’s perception of Chinese contemporary

art. But our problem was that if we stayed true to our roots, we were not considered

international and if we responded to international art, we were aping the west.” Frustrated

by misunderstandings between the two cultures, Lam decided to promote cross-cultural

dialogue, starting with her touring show, Awakening: La France Mandarine – the French

Influence on Chinese Art.

She also established The China Art Foundation to bridge the gap between the west and

China. As well as organising conversations at New York��s Metropolitan Museum of Art, it

develops partnerships and runs training programmes for museum staff.

China is at a crucial stage of development, she feels. “We’re trying to find our Chinese

contemporary culture. Who are we today? We have experienced over 150 years of cultural

collapse and western domination and now, finally, we can stand up and have a voice.”

But with no tradition of galleries and museums, the question of how to develop

contemporary artists’ careers is an issue. It is part of what prompted her return to Hong

Kong.

“Not-for-profit activities are all very well, but in Asia museums don’t have a voice,” she

says. “Art is seen through auction houses, as an investment. I realised a couple of years ago

that if I want an artist to be academically endorsed, to be really big, I have to strategise in a

different way, to use the art market and the commercial gallery system to build them up.”

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