A Dragon in Venice: Lap-See Lam Stages an Avant-Garde Cantonese Opera in the Nordic Pavilion

A version of this article was published in LIFE China with the title 龙在威尼斯：林立施北欧馆上演前卫粤剧，颂扬华人移民文化.

At this year’s Venice Biennial, a larger-than-life brass and steel dragon head and tail installed on the exterior front and back of the Nordic Pavilion ushers visitors into the building and onto a stage celebrating Chinese diasporic culture and exploring multi-cultural world-building as part of the audiovisual installation Altersea Opera. By merging a mythological Cantonese folktale with that of a very real Chinese imperial-style dragon ship, originally home to a Chinese restaurant, artist Lap See Lam, born to Cantonese parents who emigrated to Sweden, has together with Finnish textile artist Kholod Hawash and the multi-lingual Norwegian composer Tze Yeung Ho, also of Cantonese descent, has created an immersive Cantonese opera centering the preservation of Chinese culture abroad. The central exhibition “Foreigners Everywhere” has sparked a wave of curation surrounding themes of immigration, identity, and migration in pavilions and satellite exhibitions, and Altersea Opera is a humorous, thought-provoking, and beautiful meeting of Nordic, Iraqi, and Chinese cultures.

“Maybe one can say that, especially Altersea Opera, is a project that celebrates the richness and diversity of cultural experiences in the Nordic region, while also inviting viewers to contemplate nuances of their own identities and connections to heritage?” Stockholm-based artist Lap See Lam commented to LIFE. Positioning this statement as a question offers the viewers space to make their assumptions. Altersea Opera continues her research into the dragon ship that she first presented in her critically acclaimed solo show Dreamers’ Quay at Bonniers Konsthall in 2022, Named after the quay where the Chinese restaurant Floating Sea Palace was docked, the work was part of the artist’s ongoing investigation into Chinese restaurants. Exploring longing, preservation, nostalgia, and cultural transmission she first scanned the interior of her parent’s restaurant in Sweden’s capital, Stockholm named Bamboo Palace before it shut. The tale of Floating Sea Palace is more dramatic—it was built in Shanghai in a dynastic style and transported to Sweden, in the early 1990s. After shuttering it was acquired by an amusement park and its 100-meter, 3-story body, with details earlier presented as celebratory and honorific, was refashioned into a somber and mysterious haunted house. Through shadow theater, installation, sound, and historical objects on loan from Stockholms East Asian Museum, Dreamers’ Quay was a poetic and thoroughly researched journey exploring the spread of Cantonese culture and its diaspora, sometimes framing it as otherworldly. Altersea Opera continues that journey and in the year of the dragon, fittingly centers the dragon ship.

Located in the Giardini, the Nordic pavilion—shared by Finland, Norway, and Sweden—is characterized by its flooding natural light and was built between 1958 and 1962 with two outwardly facing walls of glass. Designed by Sverre Fehn it mimics the Nordic summer months where the sun barely sets in some places, and never sets in others. Throughout the years curatorial responsibility has varied, from joint exhibitions to the collaborating countries’ individual curation. Two years ago, the countries organized a joint exhibition of Sámi artists, from the indigenous populations that live across northern parts of the three countries. Altersea Opera forms a layered collaboration where Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish languages meld with English and Cantonese—reinforcing that having the ability to float through the nuances of various cultures, constitutes fluency in itself.

Inside the pavilion bamboo scaffolds, native to Hong Kong, create a maze in the far corner. They reference both building practices and the foundational structure of the Red Boat Opera Company, the traveling company that popularised Cantonese opera in the 19th century. Scaffolds were used to uphold the stages they performed on. The bamboo scaffolding and concept of the dragon ship sets the stage for the opera while Lo Ting, based on the mythical Hong Kong character, serves as its protagonist. As with many myths, the origin of Lo Ting’s story is unclear and it has shifted over time, however, it is a Qing Dynasty version published by Qu Dajun, a Guangzhou poet and scholar, which bears the closest resemblance to the Altersea Opera’s iteration. It states that the Lo Tings, descendants of Hong Kong people, fled their homelands in Nanjing after trying to fight the Eastern Jin Dynasty (310–420) to settle in Lantau. Fertile ground for comparing the survival of the diaspora, they developed big eyes and long tails to stay hidden from the imperial authorities as they shifted to a life of in-betweenness on land and in the sea. In the video component of the Altersea Opera playing on multiple screens, Lo Ting sings about loss, longing, and new beginnings.

Iraq-born artist Kholod Hawasi has used jodaleia technique, the Arabic term for quilting, and embroidery to transmit the opera’s narratives onto the Kimonos that are installed in the space. *I tried to find commonalities between ancient Iraqi and Chinese cultures, through the story, the myths, and the ancient tales, and through similar symbols from the ancient Iraqi myths, such as Oannes the half man half fish figure,” Hawasi tells LIFE. “There is Chinese imagery and there are also techniques and pictorial styles such as sea waves and clouds that have a lot of resemblance to Ancient Sumerian shapes,” she continues. At the pavilion’s front and end exterior the original Floating Sea Palace’s brass head and tail, created by Shanghai artist Lu Guangzheng, welcomes visitors in.

Critically acclaimed composer Tze Yeung Ho, who won the Shanghai New Music Week’s Chamber Opera Composition Competition in 2019, has written a libretto where the quest of Lo Ting, part man part sea creature, to return to his home is intertwined with the fate of the boat. During his doctoral research at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, he studied the relationship between the Cantonese language and how it influences the practice of Cantonese opera singers—”this has helped me in developing a technique which functions independently from traditional practices and reevaluates the possibilities of working with the Cantonese language within different musical contexts,” he explains. For Altersea Opera he was particularly interested in the use of percussion in Cantonese opera as a way to command the attention of the audience. Together with The Gong Strikes One, a Cantonese traditional singing duo based in Hong Kong, he has merged sounds of gongs, wood blocks, cymbals, and tam-tams that are commonplace in overtures in operatic practices. Ho’s connection to Cantonese opera is deep-seated, as a child visiting Hong Kong his grandmother used to bring him to see Cantonese operas in local theatres. However, it is important to note that his approach to the Altersea Opera is experimental rather than one that is imitative of traditional practices that exist. “After all, the work presented at the Nordic Pavilion comments on the diasporic condition, especially for third-culture kids like myself, and its relationship to practices of our heritage,” he explained.

While the flow of Cantonese language composition informed a lot of the pitch and inflectional choices in rhythms 1980s pop from Hong Kong “with direct references to Anita Mui’s music,” were also, according to the composer, a large influence in the opera. I chuckled when the narrator, Lo Ting, said in the video: ‘We were surf and turf for a while,’ an English reference to eating steak and seafood. And, when he asks: ‘Are you a pescatarian? Do you love immersive dining?’ Your answer is most probably, no—a telltale sign that you would not have eaten at the floating restaurant. He continues by explaining that when it closed and the boat fell into disrepair. In reality, it was soon acquired by Gröna Lund, a historic amusement park or Tivoli, where parts of the boat became a feature of the park’s haunted house. As the park is situated on an island on the water in part of the Stockholm archipelago which is closest to the inner city the boat continues its relationship to water, albeit pleasure is exchanged by fear. The next line is more poetic: ‘It becomes a haunted house run by others, with fear shaped by hands inflected by imitations of the oriental court…The dragon head, a costume that invoked deity and design.’ The opera alludes both to mimicry of Chinese visual language in design, such as chinoiserie (the fanciful European interpretations of Chinese styles in decorative arts and interior design popularised in the 17th- and 18th-century) and the Chinese food that keeps Chinese culture alive in popular imagination across the world.

Sweden-based curator, writer, and researcher Tawanda Appiah—an immigrant, who first traveled to Sweden to pursue university studies and stayed to work—told LIFE that the pavilion allowed him to discover Cantonese opera and immerse himself in the rich history of the Red Boat Opera. “Lap-See Lam’s archival renderings have not only broadened my understanding but also sparked a deeper appreciation for the historical interconnections between cultures,” he said. Appiah adds that exploring the Chinese community’s presence in Sweden through Lam’s work has been “profoundly enriching, adding layers of complexity and richness to my curatorial perspective.” In his work, he embraces a similar plurality: “It’s about honoring expansiveness and allowing various narratives to coexist and beautifully clash.” Ebba von Beetzen Liska, a Stockholm-based art advisor, who attended the Venice Biennial’s opening, has placed several of Lam’s works in private collections and praises the artist for being a great storyteller: “Sensitively and with clarity, Lam manages to tell a deeply personal narrative and make it universal.”

Although the work centers the avant-garde Cantonese-style opera it aims to extend beyond the experience of the Chinese diaspora. “My work is not solely about the direct understanding of specific cultural references, but perhaps rather about the universal human experience within diasporic contexts,” Lam explained. This notion was reinforced by the Swedish cultural minister Parisa Liljestrand In her speech at the inauguration of the pavilion when she used the metaphor “art can build bridges.” Prince Daniel of Sweden, Director of Moderna Museet Gitte Ørskou, and the pavilion’s curator Asrin Haidari also delivered speeches to welcome the Cantonese opera to Venice. As they spoke, their bodies were dwarfed by the enormous brass dragon head behind them. The ‘Chinese’ is more present than the ‘Scandinavian’ in the pavilion which will teach visitors about Chinese diasporic culture. As I am the daughter of an immigrant, it is touching to see the Nordics celebrate multiculturalism and immigration.

The opera reflects multiple cultural and linguistic confluences. In Finland, Swedish is an official language and it is spoken as a first language in some regions—including an island called Åland. Towards the end of the opera, the chorus repeats a line in minor ¾ time from a folksong originating from this Swedish-speaking island in Finland: ‘Vem kan segla förutan vind?’ which translates to ‘who can sail without wind?’ As the opera oscillates between the story of Lo Ting’s search for home and the fate of the boat, the mythological story does not share universal truths but rather poses questions about the role of alienation, assimilation, and memory in shaping identity. The Greek philosopher Herekleitos who said ‘everything floats’ comes to mind. He meant that everything is in constant flux, here I want to include culture and the self. Crowning the opera and the only time Cantonese is heard, a male baritone voice ends the opera: ‘Looking at’ and among a crescendo of wind instruments and percussive beats on shrill gongs, he continues to sing: ‘Looking at the sea.’ Where everything floats or moves.

Lap-See Lam’s The Altersea Opera with Kholod Hawash and Tze Yeung Ho in
The Nordic Countries Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale is open through 24 November, 2024.

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