5 Questions with Nikki Lam
Nikki Lam is an artist-curator and filmmaker based in Narrm/Melbourne and Hong Kong. Nikki’s work has been shown, published and screened widely across Australia and internationally.
With an expanded practice, she is currently co-director of Hyphenated Projects and co-runs Slow Burn Books. Nikki is a PhD (Art) candidate at RMIT University. Her practice-led PhD is about moving images in Hong Kong Diaspora.
(Still from The Unshakeable Destiny / supplied)
No.1
The Unshakeable Destiny trilogy was made between 2021 and 2025. How did it evolve over time? At what point did you land on the structure, or was this a form you knew it was going to take from the beginning?
I have a long answer that is my PhD (ha!). Basically I set out to make three chapters to coincide with my PhD candidature which I started in late 2020. I was perplexed by the political situation back home in Hong Kong throughout 2019–2020, and I was trying to find ways to witness or document the aftermath, of the political unrest and mass emigration. So I landed on a trilogy structure that hopefully, in my own ways, documents a culturally and politically transformative period and connects with the Hong Kong diaspora everywhere. I decided on an iterative approach, anchoring the whole trilogy on the first film the unshakable destiny_2101 (2021), and allowing time for the following chapters to respond, reference, work against. The first film ended up being a memory or a haunting event, re-appearing in the subsequent films.
No.2
At one point in the first film, the unshakeable destiny _2101, the caption below states “This is not nostalgia”. It’s evident the film resists the colonially-manufactured image of Hong Kong that is often presented in cinema. What did it look like sourcing locations for this film, and what decisions were being made to challenge this imaginary?
I’ve been interested in the tension between nostalgia or the nostalgic image, and its functions in the diaspora. While nostalgia is something that has existed mostly in our imagination, it also has the ability to pull the heart’s strings across generations. I was really interested in this appeal of nostalgic cinema such as Wong Kar-wai’s. While the average Hong Konger tends to struggle to understand his fragmented storytelling, his films resonate with Chinese diasporic audiences worldwide. There’s a lot to be unpacked about the use of nostalgia in Hong Kong cinema, and its prevalence during the city’s politically transformative periods (around 1989, 1997, and once again since 2019), but here, I’m mostly interested in how Hong Kong is seen from the diaspora and the west, versus how Hong Kong is seen from within.
As the trilogy progressed, we went from a cinema-inspired, constructed set in the first chapter, to situating the locations to a nondescript location with nostalgic Hong Kong images, to the final chapter Retrograde, where we filmed at locations that held personal significance: the suburban housing estate where I grew up, the ocean, and sites that represented my political relationship to Hong Kong. These are also locations that are a little less ‘Hong Kong from the outside’ but more Hong Kong from within. In a way, I was trying to peel off the nostalgia as the films progressed.
No.3
Near the beginning of your filmed interaction with Ho in the third film Retrograde, you mention that being in Hong Kong is an “archive update” when Ho asks you if “being here is part of your archive”. Can you speak more to this?
I believe memory is a form of personal archive, where information is often incomplete and overlapped. At the beginning of Julietta Singh’s no archive will restore you (2008), she writes,
we were scrambling toward the archive. We knew it was crucial, but I suspect that few of us knew what it meant, or where it was, or what to do with it.
I share this sentiment in general and really believe in a queer feminist approach towards the archive. This comes to what Singh describes as a body archive that is an attunement, a becoming and unbecoming thing—an archive that is lived through the body systems of comprehension, ingestion, digestion and waste.
In the context of Hong Kong, where there’s contested, state-informed histories, it is challenging to find lineage within a conventional ‘archive’. Here I am interested in positioning my relationship with the body archive, and [to have] these films as annotations to my own archive. In a situation where the state-run archives are often presenting selective histories, I am interested in the revisits, reimagination(s), and the overlaps of past and present. Similar to the various 8mm footage in Retrograde, information of the past digested, with residues co-existing with the present, all turning towards the self rather than against it.
No.4
As a writer-director, what comes first: the images or the text? How do you see them speaking to one another in the final video?
Text, always. But I do go through a lot of back and forth. I storyboard but I also improvise, and then I’ll go back to writing again after the shoot, often during the editing process. The post-production of Retrograde took almost over a year and a half—I was massaging the form until it felt right or a deadline hit. This chapter was particularly complicated because of its hybrid documentary style: most of the decisions happened in post-production. Whereas the first two chapters of The Unshakable Destiny, and usually in my other works, I tend to have a clear vision of what I’m trying to achieve and therefore often, motivated by a text.
No.5
There’s a duality being expressed through the film, whether through diptychs or when you and Ho are interacting with one another, a subversion of temporality perhaps. It reminds me of a line in your 2018 work Anchor: A Prelude: “The future is only the imagined version of the past.” What is your relationship to temporality, particularly with this work?
I’ve really pushed towards a version of time-based practice that shreds its skin every time I make a new work. In the context of The Unshakable Destiny, I was hoping to work fragments into its iterations, creating and breaking cycles of repetition simultaneously. This temporality is perhaps part of the migrant experience as well. As Ocean Vuong writes: ‘only their children return; only the future revisits the past’. I am not quite the children of migrants, so my time is always fleetingly in the present. I generally want to document the shift in this experience, one that is not working towards a legacy, or an external archive, but a document that only connects temporarily.
(Credit: Leah Jing McIntosh)
Find Out More
This playful, expansive trilogy explores the artist’s evolving relationship with Hong Kong as the city undergoes its own upheavals. Reworking the visual language of Asian futurism, some scenes are shot on lush 16mm, immersing viewers in swoony Cantopop and late-night neon; other scenes move away from the nostalgic, stylised world of Wong Kar Wai. In collaboration with actor Ching Ching Ho, Lam deconstructs the fictions of Hong Kong’s screen archive and her own attempts to capture memories of a disappearing homeland. This moving reflection on artmaking in the diaspora draws on collective memories to imagine possible futures.
The Unshakeable Destiny premieres at Sydney Film Festival on 13 and 15 June.
More info here.