Lam Lai

Nature Unseen: A City’s Hidden Waves (2025)

This site-specific sound installation invited participants to move floor by floor through a building, from ground level to the fourth floor. As they walked, they experienced a synchronized audio composition embedded in the space and accessed poetic text through their mobile phones. Each level introduced distinct sonic textures shaped by the building’s unique acoustics, while visual cues encouraged the audience to explore the poetic potential of each floor. The text unfolded in twenty timed reflections, gently guiding perception, rhythm, and movement throughout the experience.

Concept: Lam Lai Sound composition and spatialisation: Lam Lai Visual cues, Coding, Wearable sound object design : Lam Lai 3D printing engineering: Gökay Atabek

Avalanches from Afar

In Avalanches from Afar, visual artist Serene Hui and composer Lam Lai present a hybrid work on the borderline between immersive installation and soundscape. Described as a ‘non-performance’, the piece is a 12-hour meditation on the subtle tension between speech and silence. Avalanches from Afar has its roots in a reflection on the limits of language and the disruption of direct communication. Drawing on literary references such as Jean-Dominique Bauby's Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, personal stories and Jean-René Toussaint's ‘Stemwerk - Primitive Voice’ method, the two artists explore how words, sounds and silences weave together to create a unique space for sensory experience. The long duration encourages a total letting go, allowing the audience to connect deeply with the fragments of language, sounds and silences that make up the surrounding atmosphere.

Lam Lai Spotless White, (2024), Spatialized Analog Synthesizers, 14’ 

As the world reshapes itself to accommodate an ever-growing population, access to genuine green spaces is becoming increasingly limited, especially for those bound to cities. Instead of walking among real, living trees and experiencing nature’s vitality firsthand, we construct limitations, creating artificial environments to capture its essence and bring it indoors. But can this crafted illusion of natural beauty truly satisfy our need for connection to the natural world? By creating an artificial nature scene through sound, “Spotless White” reflects the cycle of nature, distilling its essence into a listening experience. It invites us to reconnect with memories of real encounters with nature, encouraging reflection on what may have been overlooked in those moments.

Majalla's Cloak - Frayed edges of the Leiden Cloth Museum De Lakenhal presents Majalla's Cloak from 9 November 2024 till 13 April 2025. This participatory art project explores the connections between the historic Leiden cloth industry and the slave trade.

MAJALLA

The name Majalla refers to an enslaved boy mentioned in the correspondence regarding Daniel van Eijs, an 18th-century Leiden cloth merchant and later plantation owner. Historian Sjoerd Ramackers discovered this tragic story while researching Leiden's role in colonial history. The name Majalla symbolizes the countless lives lost on Van Eijs's plantations in Berbice (present-day Guyana), where the average life span of enslaved people was only eight years.

FREEDOM CLOAK

This project was developed in the context of a hybrid residency at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam. Seven artists were invited to jointly explore contemporary topics such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Consciousness, Data Privacy and Surveillance, Simulation Theory, Existential Risk and Future of Humanity as they are raised in the 1964 SciFi-novel Simulacron-3. The group reflected on the creation of XR experiences with a strong creative and artistic component to create a collective experience that, in its core, considers the concepts of human interaction, group dynamics and empathy. The outcome of the residency, which utilized open source tools and offered guidance from experts, is Department of Interfaced Dimensions (D.I.D). Work Title: Department of Interfaced Dimensions

Collaboration with: Annika Boll (DE), Eirini Lampiri (GR), Gökay Atabek (TR), Lam Lai (HK), Merve Sahin (TR), Mihai Gui (RO), Silvana Callegari (CO)

You are invited to step into a world of play, interactivity and uncertainty. Observe, follow or collaborate with your fellow participants to navigate your way through alternative realities. Interchange roles and actively engage in a play of surveillance and manipulation.

Department of Interfaced Dimensions (D.I.D) is an interactive, mixed reality experience that combines game mechanics with virtual worlds and the materiality of kinetic props to explore themes of identity, agency and control.

2022

"Macht kommt von machen, etwas tun können" - Angela Merkel

Reverend’s daughter, Angela Kasner grew up in East Germany. Her aunt from West Germany often sent presents such as Levi’s jeans and a Beatles record. When the wall fell, she decided to let go of her scientific career and enter politics. "Whoever has been so positively surprised once in his life, thinks that a lot is possible", she says. Angela Kasner is a woman who exists.

angel is a performance about a woman who does not yet exist but who uses the same words as the real Angela. It’s a woman who, just like Angela, in her search for more and more possibilities, reaches the top of the world. The performance is a fictional portrait based on real speeches.

In angel we unleash the imagination on an important contemporary political figure. How far can you go in that imagination? When does that imagination become a lie? And when does that lie become a logical reality accepted by everyone? By dreaming the impossible, sometimes half of it becomes true.

a performative exhibition of no magic - "MAKE & BELIEVE"

Curator / Producer Orlean Lai

in collaboration with Tung Wing-hong Ng Tsz-kwan Ho Sin-tung Human Wu Lam Lai Lau Ming-hang

The notion of “fiction” and “real” is intertwined within the theatre. No matter how verisimilar the play may seem, the audience may not perceive it as real; vice versa, no matter how illusory and surreal a narrative gets to be, one can still exercise their imagination and be fully immersed in the narrative. Once stepped into the theatrical space, the audience gets to suspend their disbelief and be ready to participate in a collective “act” of fabrication – for one becomes an active spectator, the “comrade” to “conspire” an impossible reality.

Make & Believe harkens to the 2023 theatrical-installation performance We are for real, nonetheless, unfolding its narration in an exhibition space instead of a theatrical space. As the narrative context shifts, the previous distinction between “fictive” and “real” is eradicated, projecting alienated expectations and assumptions from the participating audience. In this regard, the collective experiment constructed in the theatre destructs into an individual experience with a deeper introspective focus. It liberates the audience’s unidirectional visual perspectives from the spectator seats into a scattered, all-around spectacle by allowing them to free roam within the exhibition hall. Are these transformations equipping the audience with an omniscient vision that was absent as a theatre spectator? Leaving the narrative-driven theatrical space, can the audience perceive implicit messages between and outside of the lines of the exhibits?

In Make & Believe, we invite you to join the conspiracy again – in an exhibition hall where the performers are absent. The audience is left to conceive and perceive by engaging their senses, rediscovering the idiosyncratic performative qualities of scenery, installations, lighting and soundscapes, collaging fragments of existence, non-existence, reality, “the truth” and imagination, in turn constructing their perceptual landscapes. Can the myriad of sensual stimulations, inspire one to rely on intuition to perceive and conceive, travelling inward to search for meaning and answers?

In collaboration with Tung Wing-hong (Mechanical Installation), Ng Tsz-kwan (Mechanical Installation), Ho Sin-tung (Text / Painting / Installation), Human Wu (Scenography), Lam Lai (Music / Soundscape) and Lau Ming-hang (Lighting), these multi-disciplinary artists excelling in different mediums collectively interweave a rhapsody of Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art) by echoing with one another while preserving each individual’s creative authenticity for the visitors to feast.

During the exhibition period, several curated performances will be presented. A brand-new composition crafted by Lam Lai, brought by three renowned musicians, Nazar Tabachyshyn (accordion), Wilson Chau (French Horn) and Tiffany Au Kai-see (Bassoon), will accompany the soundscape installations to render an illuminating music creation. Creative performers from We are for real, including KT Yau Ka-hei, Anson Chan, Pearlmi Tam and Tung Chung-can, will also be offering a new collaborative performance on-site. Stay tuned for the shows!

We cordially invite you to be mesmerised by the “staged exhibition”, unleashing all your talents and senses to enjoy the meticulously crafted scenography. Come dialogue with the collective creation, challenge yourself and rediscover what are the “real” and “truth” to you.

// Documentation by HKADC:

// Music Performance

Through the glass, darkly

Communication is an in between space where two beings enter the risk of being misunderstood. There is a profound truth in the continual effort to find one another.

Through the glass, darkly is a “non-performance” on voice and communication, a single time-intensive event which discusses different positions toward speaking, being silenced, the possibility to find words and to resonate.

The work emerged through reflections on the (im)possibility of language, failure of human voices, disruption of direct utterance, alternative transmission, to form a libretto - manoeuvring the story of “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly”, Monarch butterflies, personal encounters and more - set to a choreography of sound and music.

Through the glass, darkly is made of a cacophony of voices, fleeting sounds, and negative space, wavering between immersive installation and performative sound piece. It is configured as an intimate sonic landscape that unfolds gradually and spatially, representative of one’s psychic conflict with all sorts of emotions prompted by the very act of communication, inviting the audience to search for and invent their own story. It can seem obscure and chaotic, but there is always the possibility for its voices to synchronise and resonate, and create an experience of negotiation or suspension.

Presence Undefined / 未定義な。存在

Lichun Tseng & Lam Lai / ゾン・リージュン & リン・リー / 15min.

info: https://www.imageforum.co.jp/cinematheque/1068/index.html

Presence Undefined is a compilation of seven miniature films, intended to be played in any sequence at any screening. This work is an artistic experiment aimed at exploring the components of audiovisual, including layer, colour, harmony, tone, tactile, element and space. The project presents a unique opportunity to examine the intersection of these two creative domains and their shared artistic vocabulary, where the convergence of two artistic worlds stimulates delicate encounters of indeterminacy.

The visual images are created on 16mm using a variety of photochemistry experiments and processes, while the sound composition is derived from field recordings and electronic sound sources.

Created by : Orlean Lai In Collaboration With：Ng Tsz-kwan 、Ho Sin-tung、Tung Wing-hong、Lam Lai 、Lau Ming-hang、Trista Ma

Creative Performers：KT Yau Ka-hei、Anson Chan、Pearlmi Tam、Tung Chung-can、Pollux Kwok

an installation performance of make-believe

If I speak the truth in an obviously disguised field, will you believe me?  If I fake it in a ‘fake it till you make it’ space, will you also believe me?

You believe/ you don’t believe/ you sort of believe, and you doubt/ you beg yourself to believe/ you refuse to believe/ you cheat yourself into believing it… Can you really fake it till you make it?

When performers present their own self in a performance, are they role-playing? When a performer perfects an audience-preset/ expected ‘self’, can you distinguish the genuine from the acted? It is said that every illusion on the stage is a copy of reality. Are you sure that the so-called authenticity of existence exists? 

Welcome to the creators’ labyrinth of truth and illusion! Light dims, curtain rises, audience and creators entered into an indescribable and unspecified contract to construct an impossible reality together.

As we depart from the theatre, will the reality become more concrete? Does ‘truth’ only exist as a belief?

Multi-art-discipline mastermind Orlean Lai makes her directorial debut and collaborates with media/ visual artists Ng Tsz-kwan and Tung Wing-hong, composer/ sound artist Lam Lai, lighting designer Lau Ming-hang and costume designer Trista Ma. With stories and paintings created by visual artist Ho Sin-tung, the team appropriates kaleidoscopic and boundless theatre elements, and altogether constructs an inconceivable, magical landscape. Multi-talented and highly unique performers KT Yau Ka-hei, Anson Chan, Pearlmi Tam, Tung Chung-can and Pollux Kwok perform themselves with every means of solution, unleashing spectacle and imagination from viewing and performing!

About the Exhibition Ventriloquists’ Stone takes as its cue the ‘Magic Art of the Great Humbug’.  It is an exercise in misdirection and misplacement, a secret in plain view, a crucible of ruin and regeneration, a porous theatre of cohabitation.  It owes as much to the ingenuity of mini-golf courses as it does to classical garden designs.  It equates, with a wilful disregard for our everyday sense of scale, urban building typologies with circuit board components, giant monsters with merry munchkins. (https://vntrlq.info/About)

About the Soundscape composition Between now and the end of April, you'll hear the soundscape version I've tailored for it. Duration approximately 25 minutes. If you can stay inside for a while, you'll notice that sound travels between the 3 spaces in an interesting way.

There is no place like Home (Beta) for Orchestra and Live electronics

the acoustic memory of a building

Curated by NEW EMERGENCES, ACOUSTIC INTERIORS creates sonic portraits of the two buildings between which the Royal Conservatoire is currently transitioning: the old one at Juliana van Stolberglaan 1, a building full of stories, and the brand new Amare, an almost empty building at Spuiplein 150.

Which sounds in the old busy building would you like to preserve? Which sounds from Amare would you like to capture before it gets busy there? And after the old building has been abandoned, which spaces would you like to revisit?  The ACOUSTIC INTERIORS project presentation took place in 2022. The final presentation included a digital release, an installation and a website.

BEA 5 (former analog studio) 3'09"

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BEA 6 (former studio for live electronics) 2'56"

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BEA 7 (former studio for wave field) 3'10"

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Installation & Direction | A.I., John van Oostrum Text | A.I, Jibbe Willems, Ninke Overbeek Music | A.I., Lam Lai Stage design | Noa Helder Acting | A.I., Anna Schoen, Chandana Sarma, Jeroen van Arkel, Monica Hofman orchestra De Ereprijs | conducted by Gregory Charette Production | Caco Verhees Technique | Vincent Krouwer Publicity | Kelly de Haan, Lies Mensink, Janaï Shibolet, Marcel Vos Campaign image | Studio Miek Uittenhout

human/Artificial Intelligence

What kind of creature is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) anyway? And what is a human? Can AI think, philosophise and even create art with us about this? In h/AI, de Veenfabriek, Orkest De Ereprijs and theatre group ECHO take up the challenge and make superhuman musical theatre together with AI.

Artificial intelligence has become part of our humanity. It supports our thought processes, influences our choices and takes over more and more tasks from us. Unnoticed, "AI" is already in our devices and systems. Just a little longer and AI will take over our heads. According to supporters, this promises much good, but critics point to future dangers. Will AI help us rise above ourselves? Or will it make us fall to earth with our pride?

h/AI is a superhuman manifestation featuring four actors, a 14-piece orchestra, AI and the audience. How big is AI's influence on the play, the music and what does the audience notice? We will experience it in h/AI, human/Artificial Intelligence: musical theatre by creators, actors, musicians and audiences who, together with AI, enter the future.

SIGHTLESS SEEING #5: REMEMBER BY HEART by Sarah van Lamsweerde