Lap-See Lam Explores Chinese Diaspora Through the Lens of a Spectral Ship
**Lap-See Lam’s “Floating Sea Palace”: An Exploration of Diasporic Identity and Cultural Haunting**
In London’s Studio Voltaire, Lap-See Lam’s *Floating Sea Palace* offers a deeply evocative exploration of diasporic identity, migration, and cultural memory. Inspired by a peculiar and fascinating story from the 1990s, Lam’s film installation conjures the ghost of a Chinese floating restaurant, the very real *Floating Sea Palace*, and weaves it into a broader reflection on the Chinese diaspora in the West.
**The Story Behind the Floating Sea Palace**
In the early 1990s, a Shanghai entrepreneur commissioned a lavish three-story ship adorned with intricate Cantonese carvings and crowned by a large dragon head. Its primary function? To serve as a floating Chinese restaurant – a cultural phenomenon that is largely found outside of China itself. The ship meandered through European ports for years, eventually becoming an amusement park attraction in Sweden before falling into disrepair. For Lam, this restaurant-turned-attraction represents more than just a quirky story of a ship gone awry. It is symbolic of the exoticization, reinvention, and complex legacies associated with Chinese culture in Western contexts.
**The Film: A Cyclical Journey Through Exile and Haunting**
Lam’s film takes the name of the ship itself, *Floating Sea Palace*, drawing on its layered cultural relevance. Projected onto a translucent screen mounted on a bamboo structure that resembles the setups used for Cantonese operas, the film immerses the audience in an almost dreamlike atmosphere from the outset. As visitors walk into the exhibition, they are immediately engulfed by the ambient sound, disjointed images, and flickers of light — all intentionally disorienting.
Central to the narrative is the hybrid character of Lo Ting, a mix between fish and human that serves as a legendary ancestor for Hong Kong’s people. The mythological creature mirrors the contradictions inherent in diasporic identity: the blending of cultures, the tensions between myth and reality, and the ongoing negotiation of multiple histories.
As the film progresses, the characters meander through memory and narrative, pausing to utter, “begin again” in both English and Cantonese. This phrase becomes a metaphor for the experience of migration, exile, and the re-interpretation of identity. The ship, at the mercy of storms both literal and figurative, recycles identities through retelling—first as a restaurant, later as a fairground attraction, eventually closer to ruin yet stronger in symbolic meaning.
**The Unreached Destination: Diaspora as Permanent Dislocation**
Lam’s use of the ship becomes an allegory for the diasporic experience: aimless, perpetually floating, never truly arriving. Rather than settle on one shore, the floating restaurant becomes a vessel loaded with cultural baggage, struggling between what was left behind and what lies ahead. This tension, Lam suggests, mirrors the reality of those in diaspora—where home is an elusive concept, and each attempt to adapt in a new land leads to yet another transformation or mistranslation of that identity.
**Exoticization and Hauntology**
The concept of haunting reverberates throughout Lam’s work. At times, it is literal, such as when the ship’s latest iteration as a Swedish amusement park attraction grotesquely markets itself as a place “from the Orient with a thousand-year curse.” This draws attention to the superficial, and often harmful, ways that Western societies distort and market Chinese culture for profit or novelty.
But Lam’s haunting is also metaphorical. The piece is steeped in themes of collective memory and the weight of intergenerational trauma. Like the folkloric Lo Ting, diasporic identities must carry the burden of past migrations and memories—each individual or generation drawing something unique from those collective experiences.
“The ship creaks with the strain of its own hauntology,” intones one of the characters, underscoring the sense that both the vessel and the people aboard are trapped in time, replaying history with every new departure. In this sense, Lam is drawing on the idea of ‘hauntology,’ coined by philosopher Jacques Derrida, which refers to how the past – real or imagined – continues to influence the present. For diasporas, this past is multifaceted and never fully resolved.
**A Cultural Legacy that Grows**
While the *Floating Sea Palace* may have diminished in grandeur over the years—as it sank from cultural restaurant to haunted amusement—the weight of its symbolism has only swelled. As Lam’s film vividly portrays, the transformations of the ship reflect the ongoing adaptations of diasporic cultures. Each new “retelling” of the ship — whether through memory, film, or historical artifact — adds layers of meaning to the culture it represents.
**Installation as Immersion**
Lam has chosen an installation style that is itself grounded in diasporic cultural motifs. The bamboo scaffolding that houses