Nikki Lam is an artist-curator and filmmaker based between Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) and Hong Kong.
Working primarily with moving images and text, their work contemplates time, memory and its impermanence. Their latest work The Unshakable Destiny (2021-2025) is a modular moving image trilogy on Hong Kong cinema, history and its spectres, exploring diaspora art making as a witness to the slippery political context of a homeland from afar. Nikki’s practice often explores the complexity and multiplicity of migratory expressions: its tension, fragmentation and speculation.
Nikki’s work has been shown widely across Australia and internationally, including Sydney Film Festival (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, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI), TarraWarra Museum of Art, Jakarta Independent Film Festival in Indonesia, GRRL HAUS Berlin, Itoshima Art Farm International Arts Festival in Japan and Pier 2 Art Center in Taiwan.
Her recent work The Unshakable Destiny trilogy (2021-2025) was in Sydney Film Festival 2025 Official Selection, shortlisted for multiple art prizes across Australia and awarded Best Audio Visual Project at Jakarta Independent Film Festival in 2022. Her writing has been published in Meanjin Quarterly, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ), Liminal and others. She has undertaken artist residencies at Studio Voltaire (UK), ACME London (UK), Pier 2 Art Center (Taiwan) and Desa (Indonesia).
With an expansive practice and a focus on Asian diasporas, Nikki is co-director of Hyphenated Biennial and 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. She co-founded Slow Burn Books in 2020, an art publisher and bookshop that circulates independent publications across Asia-Pacific. She has previously been a Curator at The Substation (2017-2023), Artistic Director at Channels video art festival (2013-2017), 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. She is a finalist in Asian-Australian Leadership Awards 2024.
Nikki is a current PhD (Art) candidate at RMIT University, where they currently lecture. Their practice-led PhD is about moving images in Hong Kong Diaspora.
email︎nikki [at] thecuriousother.info
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Image by Leah Jing McIntosh, 2024
︎Working in Narrm:
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.
原本是，永遠都是原住民的土地。