The performance lasts for approximately 20mins. As the artist enacts the ritual of cutting her hair with a pair of scissors that denote a personal history for her, and then placing it in a box within the exhibition space, she yearns to elicit emotive responses from the audience, inviting them to participate through the abstract form of language, history, and memory.
Lâm’s latest series evolved over the last four years while living a nomadic existence, researching and working in the United States, Europe, and eventually Thailand where she completed her research during her artist residency with Peruke Projects. Her full objective is to document and present her research, as well as illustrate her emotional and creative responses to her time living in the diaspora, during the Covid-19 pandemic, surviving the traumas of being a target of racism, and the challenges of being unable to return to her home country.
Separated from her homeland, Lâm’s performance is both a tribute and a documentation of, in, and among the diaspora and her personal experiences as a “refugee”. Having let her hair grow out during the four-year passage of time, she now cuts it for the audience to confront toxic stereotypes and hate crimes towards Asian women.
As the artist enacts the ritual of cutting and collecting the hair in a box, by using a pair of scissors that denote a personal history for her, she yearns to elicit emotive responses from the audience as she invites them to participate through the abstract form of language, history, and memory. More specifically, with her use of paper notes highlighting traumatic experiences, the presentation of some of her possessions, and fragments of a body that moves endlessly through space and time, Lâm shares a spiritual and highly charged, ephemeral instance with the viewer.
