The picture shows Karena Lam in her pottery studio. As an actress, she is best known for roles in July Rhapsody and Inner Senses, in which she starred opposite Leslie Cheung. In recent years, she has appeared in public in a string of art-related identities: photographer, exhibition curator, juror for an art prize, and potter, a new role into which she has poured enormous passion over the past three years. In conversation, Lam repeatedly stressed that she is wary of labels and dislikes being confined by them.
She kept modestly asking us not to call her a “ceramicist.” “Pottery helps me understand myself, face myself, have more conviction, and be more willing to fail,” Lam said. On the eve of Lunar New Year in 2023, we visited her small, warm, fully equipped pottery studio in Hong Kong to talk about her three-year journey with clay and about her work and life. Lam’s studio is in Kwun Tong, a simple, narrow space of roughly 30 square meters.
The first thing that stands out on entering is a whole wall of towering shelves, crowded with finished and half-finished ceramic pieces of all sizes: some hand-built, some wheel-thrown cups, and some jars whose clay bodies she had just trimmed and left to dry. In front of the shelves is a long, broad wooden table. On the day of the shoot, we arrived at almost the same time as Lam. She wore an ordinary white long-sleeved T-shirt, her smooth shoulder-length hair loose, and she spoke softly, with a bright smile.
As soon as she got to the studio, she tied on a black work apron spattered with earthy flecks of clay, looking every bit ready to begin laboring. While we set up the camera equipment and adjusted the light, she tidied the studio, wiping down the table with a rag and shifting objects into place herself. There was nothing of the grand star about her; she came across instead as approachable, like a next-door older sister who loves life. This is where she rolls coils, builds with them, sands her pottery, reads, arranges flowers, drinks tea, and sits in thought.
Lam told us that on several occasions she had even spent the night in the studio. “When a typhoon came and I couldn’t get a ride home, I just stayed here making pottery for more than ten, almost twenty hours straight. It was crazy. But I was only following my body and my hands.” Farther inside the studio, in front of a large floor-to-ceiling window, sits a throwing wheel encircled by three slim low wooden benches. Before throwing, Lam deftly tied back her hair, tucked the loose strands behind her ears, and began shaping the wet clay with exacting care.
Normally, a clay body has to be fired before it truly becomes a ceramic object, but Lam told us that she finds unfired greenware interesting in itself. Because it has not been fired, even if it has dried in the air, it can be combined with water again and turned back into fresh clay, ready to become something new.
One recent “large-scale greenware recycling” came in Lam’s solo ceramics exhibition Take Care You. Working with Lam Muk Pottery, she produced 2700 unfired bowls, then smashed all of them and piled the shards into a small hill-like installation at the exhibition site, documenting the act and turning it into a five-minute video work shown in the exhibition, Take Care You, 2022.
“Why did I want to smash the greenware? At first it was because of a dream I had, where I kept smashing ceramics over and over. Maybe I had accumulated a lot of emotion in my subconscious: brokenness, unhappiness, anger. After you smash the bowls and let those emotions out, you become calmer.” Lam said this while discussing the footage of smashed greenware shown in Take Care You and the scene in which she filmed the act of destruction.
Lam feels that the three years of the pandemic brought enormous change to the entire world. In Hong Kong, where living space is scarce and costly, work-from-home arrangements were cramped, children may have been taking online classes in very small rooms, and people were carrying many wounds that needed healing. “I felt that the atmosphere was off, that there were a lot of negative things, and I wanted to bring them out and talk about them,” Lam said. That is also where the title Take Care You came from: she wanted to discuss the damage caused by the pandemic’s three years, to talk through what was bad, and then look ahead. The handmade ceramic bowl is one of the works that emerged from that impulse.
After the exhibition ended, she gathered the fragments of all 2700 greenware bowls, added water, threw the clay again, and then fired it into rice bowls. She placed these bowls at the Oi! art center in North Point, where for six months anyone who came to see the exhibition could take home a rice bowl that she had personally thrown and fired.
“After the ‘talk,’ the audience can bring this bowl into their own lives. Life goes on as usual; we can still live well.” Lam also spent half a year hand-building and coloring twenty ceramic chairs, which she placed in the exhibition space so that viewers could stand on them or sit on them. A ceramic stool she made by hand also appeared at the Take Care You exhibition site in 2022.
After the exhibition ended, she donated all of those ceramic chairs as well.
“My relationship with clay is very simple. I have never thought of making a living from it, and the proceeds from charity sales have all been donated to local charitable organizations. More often, I give works away to friends and farmers. Pottery is purely a hobby through which I explore my inner world and heal myself,” Lam said. In her studio, we also found many masks made from unfired clay. She said she is also learning how to shape human faces, including doll heads in greenware.
For someone who began learning pottery from scratch only a little more than three years ago, the vitality and expressive force in her work are astonishing. She told us that these masks grew out of The Biography of Statues, an immersive musical-theater project in Hong Kong’s New Vision Arts Festival. As an actress, she independently completed part of the script and wanted the performance to explore the relationship between mother and daughter. “I think the relationship between mother and daughter is very complex and very particular. It is love, but also another kind of dominance, and it can bring a great deal of pain.”
In the course of the twenty-minute performance, she made an unfired clay doll’s head. As water touched the doll’s face and softened it, the effect was as if the doll were crying.
“You watch the doll’s greenware face slowly collapse and deform, and you start to wonder whether that distortion and sadness were caused by the mother, or by the daughter.” Lam said that she performed the work forty times, and so made forty greenware dolls. Apart from the final three that we saw in the studio, all the others had already been smashed and recycled. The work appeared in rehearsal at Hong Kong’s New Vision Arts Festival, on a transparent glass theater stage.
On the day of our shoot, Lam smashed the final greenware doll heads in the studio. “Today I’m going to break the last three dolls’ heads. I find the process very healing. Clay is very forgiving. Every time I recycle greenware, it feels as though I’m making peace with myself, filling in the wounds I’ve carried from the past.” As for pottery, she feels it is a mode of creation one could spend a lifetime learning and never exhaust.
“But I think that’s fine. I’m not in a hurry to get anywhere, so I have plenty of time to get to know it properly.” What many people do not know is that Lam has published three photography books and, since 2016, has curated book exhibitions, a calligraphy exhibition, and art exhibitions. Last year, she also served as a juror for the annual emerging artist award of SAF (The Sovereign Asian Art Prize).
It could be called a crossing over, from acting into art.
“Art has always been one of my interests. Whatever I do, it all happens very naturally. More than twenty years ago, my father gave me my first Polaroid camera, and photography became a medium through which I could record my feelings in the moment and my life,” Lam said. She later curated her own photography exhibition, VOYAGES by KARENA LAM, which included Polaroids she took at the exhibition site in 2021. She said she likes instant cameras and Polaroids precisely because there is only one chance to make the image: no retouching, no do-over. Each exposure makes you hold your breath, and in that way they record the truest things in the most primal form.
Some of the photographs she accumulated in the past have already yellowed, but she still keeps them in old shoeboxes.
“At the moment you take the picture, you may not think it means much. Maybe the light is beautiful, or maybe it matches your mood. But when you look at it again more than twenty years later, you realize that time can’t come back. You remember your mood then, the weather, that the air was sweet. A photograph makes feeling and intuition concrete.” Lam’s first curatorial project came in September 2016, when she organized a small Hong Kong exhibition of Hana, calligraphy works by the Japanese calligrapher Yu-ichi Inoue. The floral decoration above the gallery was also done entirely by Lam in 2016.
She said that many years ago, when she saw Inoue’s work in Tokyo, she was immediately moved. Inoue’s story during the Second World War is legendary, even tinged with the mystical. At the time, he was teaching at an elementary school in Yokohama, Japan, when bombs dropped by the United States destroyed the school, and Inoue fainted on the spot. People thought he had died and carried his body to the school athletic field. Eight hours later, he regained consciousness and said that during those eight hours he had dreamed of Shakyamuni scattering flower petals from the sky to bless the beings below. Lam appeared at the exhibition site for Yu-ichi Inoue’s Hana in 2016.
“Actors are probably people who love stories and know how to tell them. Inoue’s story is deeply moving. Once you understand his life, the experience of looking at his work is completely different,” Lam said. Also out of affection, she curated Send In The Clowns, a solo exhibition in Hong Kong in 2018 for the Japanese artist Mayumi Watanabe, bringing the artist’s work there for a solo show for the first time.
“She has a childlike power of observation. The colors are very spare, but there’s also a sense of loneliness.” Lam joked that she is the most unprofessional curator in the world, because she works only by intuition. Watanabe’s series had to do with the circus, so Lam thought of hanging the works in white translucent tents at the exhibition site and of arranging a duet to echo them, choreographed by Lam herself in collaboration with Abby Chan. That sensitivity and instinct for art also made her especially alert to the content of works when she served as a judge for the SAF art prize.
During the pandemic, being a juror for an art competition was not easy, because she could neither truly see nor touch the submitted works. She could only view images of the pieces and artists’ introductions on a screen, and the experience always felt mediated, separated by a layer. Asked which work she liked best among those she had seen, she chose a photographic work by the Korean artist Ahn Jun, perhaps because of her own affinity with the medium: Self-Portrait, 2022. “In her grandmother’s garden, she made a photograph of herself setting fire to branches and leaves.”
“Because of South Korea’s very strict pandemic policies at the time, she missed the chance to see her grandmother one last time, and she also missed the funeral and cremation.” When Lam saw the work, she was profoundly shaken.
“You can feel the artist’s honesty. Her heaviness, grief, and sorrow are all exposed before the viewer. She dares to face the ‘hole’ inside herself. To me, work is good if it can truly face the self and move people.” Throughout the interview, Lam kept emphasizing to us: do not call her a “ceramicist,” a “curator,” a “photographer,” or an “artist.” Flower vessels she made in the pottery studio were also part of the exhibition we saw.
“I’m just an actor. I try many things simply because I like them. What I fear most is labels, because once you have a label, you are no longer free.” Whether she was talking about pottery, curating, or photography, her eyes always seemed full of points of light. In her primary profession as an actress, she has worked alongside countless outstanding senior and peer performers and has compiled an impressive record, including a full sweep of major industry honors such as the Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Actress. Stills from July Rhapsody accompanied this part of the conversation.
She said that what confirmed her decision to pursue a career in acting were her first two films: July Rhapsody, directed by Ann Hui, and Inner Senses, in which she worked with Leslie Cheung. Her acting life, too, remains inseparable from the “freedom” and “experience” she values so much. July Rhapsody was Lam’s first film. At the time, in order to help her experience and understand the role, the crew let her take home the costumes, prop picture books, and backpack used in the film, so that these things would become genuinely entwined with her life.
On set, Ann Hui never restricted her freedom, and let her understand that an actor is “fluid.” After her breakthrough, she was not dazzled by fame and profit and did not rush to take on a slew of commercial films. Instead, she kept her own standards and principles, and she was exacting in her choice of scripts. From the innocent, bold high-school girl in July Rhapsody to the sick, exhausted mother in American Girl last year, what has remained constant, beyond a more refined technique and a richer range of roles, is the delicacy and truthfulness of Lam’s performances.
Even now, she still keeps a habit from her earliest days on film sets: she does not chat idly with other actors, but works to gather her energy, watching the lighting and the placement of the camera rather than lowering her head to scroll through her phone. A publicity image from the New Vision Arts Festival theater production accompanied this recollection.
“My first two films taught me that filmmaking is something sacred, and that you have to approach it with reverence,” Lam said. Looking over her life, it is clear that whether she is acting, making pottery, doing art, or being a mother, she brings seriousness and commitment to each of these parallel roles. Also shown was the acrylic-painted trunk and two hundred handmade ceramic rice bowls she created for Louis Vuitton’s two-hundredth anniversary, the trunk painted by Lam with Hong Kong’s city flower, the Bauhinia.
“But do you know? The life I long for most is one in which I only have to focus on one thing.” Lam said this jokingly. When we asked how she balanced acting, pottery, and motherhood, she answered modestly that she was still learning.
“I have emotions too, and I make wrong judgments too. I can only try my best to do well at being myself, whether as an actor or in pottery. And being a mother is the hardest job in the world.” Her two daughters are Kayla, who is 12 and in adolescence, and Sofie, who is 9. Lam said that she has always regarded her daughters as highly independent individuals, and that whenever there are changes or decisions in life, she communicates with them democratically.
She first began learning pottery because, three years ago, when the pandemic broke out, she started taking her daughters to a pottery studio herself for craft sessions, only to plunge headlong into the world of clay. Interestingly, after realizing how devoted Lam had become to clay, neither daughter wanted to touch it anymore. To some extent, they felt that clay had “stolen” their mother. “Because apart from acting, I probably gave all my remaining time to pottery,” she said while practicing how to sculpt a human face.
“One day my older daughter said to me, ‘Mom, I think you love clay more than you love me.’” Lam said that she answered her daughters very seriously: love cannot be compared that way. Because Kayla and Sofie both love reading so much that they even read while brushing their teeth, she used books as an analogy. “I said, ‘I would never ask you to give up reading just to keep me company. By the same token, you can’t ask me to give up clay. To have something you love is far too rare and precious.’”
She said that her relationship with her daughters is not fixed once and for all. “You have to observe, accompany, and be objective enough. Sometimes you need distance; sometimes you need to come a little closer. And because of them, I’ve become a better listener.” She said that the hardest thing about parenting now is that the Internet gives children access to so much information that it fills them with inner force; sometimes she finds that the principles she explains no longer strike them as right.
“All I can do is calmly tell them that adults make mistakes too, and that what we know is limited.” Lam said that at this point in her life she has discovered a tendency to choose the more difficult road every time, whether in career, life, or personal passions. In one birthday photograph, the character “flower” behind her is a work by Yu-ichi Inoue; in another, she is outdoors with friends.
“But if you asked me to choose again, I would still choose the same road. A lot of people ask me, ‘Aren’t you tired?’ In fact, I am very tired, but because of love I don’t bother to keep score.” Many of the choices she has made diverge, at least somewhat, from conventional ideas of “universal values.” Many people do not understand why she is so devoted to pottery. Why not quietly be a good mother, treat acting as a job, and leave it at that? Why carve out such a large piece of time for ceramics?
Lam feels that this kind of voice is a form of confinement imposed on women. She believes that she is a wife and a mother, but that making ceramics is also a lifelong passion she wants to pursue. Images from the studio show her making pottery and taking ceramic pieces out of the drying kiln.