Kenneth Lam - The End of an Era
Kenneth Lam is a London-based photographer whose work stems from a highly personal, autobiographical perspective. His meticulous photographs and reflective prose honour the beauty and rituals of Chinese culture. Photography, for Lam, is a communicative practice which allows him to visualize the stories he wishes to tell. Where words may lack, photography does the speaking.
We talk with Lam about his previously unreleased story The End of an Era. Keep reading below for a portal into Shan Pui Tsuen village as experienced by Kenneth Lam during a humid Hong Kong summer in 2020.
- Alexa Fahlman
Last summer, despite Hong Kong’s strict lockdown restrictions, Kenneth Lam travelled to his grandma’s ancestral village in the Hong Kong New Territories. There, he spent two weeks quarantining in isolation. While this has been a yearly trip Lam has taken since the age of 14, his most recent visit felt essential. The main reason, he notes, was because he knew his yearly visits to his grandmother were precious and numbered; by the time she passes away, what’s left of the village will only be a relic of his memory. The series therefore depicts The End of an Era–a nod to the inevitability of change, as well as a celebration and acceptance of life’s temporality.
Shan Pui Tsuen is one of the last remaining villages of its kind. Ancient buildings, with aged ceramic roofs characteristic of Qing vernacular architecture, face tall grassy fields and the Kam Tin River. Historically, the village had rice fields and fishing ponds, where Lam’s grandmother was a rice picker, and where his father and uncles worked as children. His grandmother’s house, he writes, “Is perhaps one of the last old buildings in the village; it’s a place of stillness, hot and humid, but also beautiful.” There’s a certain tranquility to be found in the village’s summer season–butterflies, birds chirping, frogs jumping at night and sweet lychees. Lam’s crisp images depict the mundane activities and objects of village life. His cleverly staged photographs of toothpicks, tupperware, medication, and quotidian meals showcase the joyful character and idiosyncrasies of his grandmother’s daily life.
Yet, summers must always come to an end and life continues to change with the seasons of modernity. What was once just “a big old rice field” has changed drastically throughout Lam’s lifetime. When he first visited, he remembers being too afraid to sleep at night, “Always looking out my window and seeing only one hut building in the middle of this field with one dog chained up.” Now, at 26 years old, Lam sits in a vest and shorts drinking cream soda–a necessity, he notes, in humid weather–and looks out at that same field filled to the rim with new apartments and residents travelling back and forth from the city to their demanding jobs. While the village community still functions on an everyone-knows-everyone basis, Lam notices the creeping modernization from central Hong Kong. Each year, he sees new buildings, more tourists, and watches as the car park becomes more crowded. As Lam ages, the village itself grows taller too; shiny, tall new buildings owned by the sons of the village are decorated elaborately to signify their wealth. “I’ll inherit one too, one day,” Lam reflects.
For now, however, Lam’s day-to-day routine at the village stays the same. He first wakes up, and walks two minutes across the courtyard to his grandmother’s. There, his breakfast waits at the table–warm congee, fresh Chinese baked goods, baos or dumplings have already been brought from the market by his dad or aunt. After a few bites, he wanders over to wake his grandmother and sits next to her whilst she eats. “She grew up without food,” Lam notes, “she likes to watch me eat, and smiles when I do, so I always eat more.” Once she’s finished, he goes running around the village’s huge fishing lake, which he mentions, “stinks towards the end from pollution streaming in from Shenzhen.”
Afterwards, he showers, reads and naps next to his grandmother–just being in her presence is enough to make the day worthwhile. “She’s old and bedridden,” Lam says, “before I’d take her to the wet market every day.” Lam continues, “at the market we buy fruit, vegetables and fresh fish, sometimes even a chicken, which is killed right in front of us. The wet market is always gruesome and smelly, but I've learnt to love it.” The produce from the wet market has deeply inspired and shaped Lam’s photography and reflective writing. His short story The Life and Death of a Fish details the daily ritual of buying a fresh fish for dinner, signifying the wet market’s role in the tapestry of typical Chinese life.
While negative, simplistic narrations of Chinese wet markets have permeated Western media since the advent of covid-19, Lam’s art depoliticizes what is simply a way of life–one which unlike Western supermarkets, confronts the often gruesome practice of eating meat.
“6:00pm SHARP is dinner,” Lam emphasizes, “if you are not back by 6:00pm you have insulted the whole family.” Nowadays, he eats first, and when finished, sits with his grandma, feeds her, and then stays by her side as she quietly scratches his back. Eventually she tells him to wash and get changed for bed, and he leaves her house at 8:00pm. Back when he was in his early 20s, Lam remembers how Hong Kong was irresistible, “I’d meet friends, go out, and drink til the early hours.” However, his friends have since left, so he returns home and tends to his projects until he drifts off to sleep. “It’s lonely there, but I come back for her.” When asked how the village has shaped him, Lam’s response echoes the sentiments shared by many first generation children:
The Village has shown me how spoilt I am. How privileged I am. I don’t have to work relentlessly to get where I am. I don’t have to worry about food. I am spoilt and I’m Westernized. But it's my Chinese heritage that has been nurtured by the village, which enriches my work and my being. I've learnt personal lessons and work lessons from that village. There have been moments of grief and celebration, and watching how we "the villagers” and my elders deal with these situations, has hugely influenced my work. And so, my work is a conversation about the differences between the west and east–and my truth is told through the lens of my own experiences.
In this way, The End of an Era is akin to a diary. It doesn’t claim to present a complete history and generic documentation of his grandma’s village. Rather, Lam’s series is shaped by his experiences as a grandson of Shan Psui Tsuen village and a gay, Chinese working man who takes photographs. His photographs are thus, a window into a life that has never been documented to this extent–a life that is, entirely his own.
