Nikki Lam is an artist, filmmaker and curator based between Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) and Hong Kong.
My practice spans moving image, text, performance, curation and publishing—as discursive and fragmented forms responsive to the world we live in. I see these forms as anchors for multiplicity, and for understanding migratory or diasporic experiences.
My current research speculates the diaspora artist as a ghost in multiple worlds.
Blurring fiction with performance, I often work with poetics of time in my moving image work. I am most interested in memory’s elusiveness and impermanence: its iterations, refractions and returns. I explore these themes with narration, repetition and apparition.
My most recent work, a five-year modular moving image trilogy The Unshakable Destiny (2021-2025) observes s a moment of heightened visibility for Hong Kong visual culture following the 2019 unrest, responding to scholar Ackbar Abbas’s seminal 1997 theory of Hong Kong culture as a ‘culture of disappearance’. The project considers diasporic subjectivity as a refractive position to homelands, narrating grief through cinematic vernacular and their spectral returns in post-2019 Hong Kong.
My art practice intersects with my research and curatorial work in Asian diaspora, as co-director of Hyphenated Projects (2018-present), Hyphenated Biennial (2020-2022) and Slow Burn Books (2020-present); all of which focus on neighbouring dialogues between Asian Australia and the Asia Pacific region through artist residencies, collaborations, exhibitions, and independent publishing.
My art and curatorial practice informs my research of diasporic cultural production and circulation—such as post-2019 Hong Kong diaspora—forming part of my practice-led PhD project at RMIT University (Melbourne).
︎ Summary ︎
Nikki’s work has been shown widely across Australia and internationally, including: Whitechapel Gallery, London, Sydney Film Festival (2025), Brent Biennial, London (2025), Primavera: Australian Young Artists 2023 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, Melbourne Now (2023) at National Gallery of Victoria, Only the future revisits the past (2024) at Centre for Contemporary Photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI), Pier 2 Art Center, Taiwan and Current Plans, Hong Kong.
Nikki’s recent work The Unshakable Destiny trilogy (2021-2025) was shortlisted for multiple national art prizes across Australia including Darebin Art Prize (2026), Footscray Art Prize (2023), Incinerator Art Award (2021), Wyndham Art Prize (2021) and awarded Best Audio Visual Project at Jakarta Independent Film Festival, Indonesia (2022).
Nikki has been awarded artist residencies around the world including Studio Voltaire (London), ACME London (London), Pier 2 Art Center (Taiwan) and Desa (Indonesia).
With an expansive practice and focus on Asian diaspora discourse, Nikki is co-director of Hyphenated Projects, an artist-led network that nurtures practice in Asian diasporas, and the winner of Creative Australia’s Asia Pacific Arts Award for Innovation in 2024. They co-founded Slow Burn Books in 2020, an art publisher and research project that circulates independent publications from Asia and its diaspora. Nikki is a finalist of Asialink’s Asian-Australian Leadership Awards in 2024.
Nikki often works in festival-scale curation and programming, from unconventional exhibition spaces to multi-site exhibitions, their curatorial work is iterative, discursive and collaborative. Some of their independent curatorial projects include: Hyphenated Biennial (2020-2022), Channel video art festival (2015), Woke in Fright (2022), everything that exists in the current (2019), Frames of Seeing at Nite Art (2017). Their writing has been published in Meanjin Quarterly, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ), Art+Australia, Liminal, fine print and others.
Nikki is currently Board Chair at artist-run space Bus Projects. They have previously been a Curator at The Substation (2017-2023), Artistic Director at Channels video art festival (2014-2017), creative advisory group at Arts House (2023), board member at NETS Victoria (2020-2022), as well as programming and advisory roles at ACMI, Next Wave, Footscray Community Arts, Seventh Gallery and others.
︎Working in Naarm: 我在此承認身處土地以及水域既傳統繼承人，Wurundjeri族丶Boon Wurrung族，以及Kulin Nations 所有族群。原住民悠久和豐富的知識和文化，是此地藝術家創作的空氣和養份。我在此真心感謝原住民以及他們的長輩。
I would like to acknowledge that I live and work on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nation. I would like to offer my gratitude and respect to the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples, their elders past and present. Sovereignty was never ceded on this land and colonialisation is ongoing. No settler artists can create without the rich cultures that preceded us which continues to live and flourish on this land. From the river to the sea, always was always will be.
Image by Leah Jing McIntosh, 2024