Mother’s Tongue

Lap-See Lam & Wingyee Wu 

2018



Moderna Museet, Malmö

Curated by Andreas Nilsson

9.10.2018 - 6.1.2019

Photo: Helene Toresdotter/ Moderna Museet

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In the New Gallery this fall Moderna Museet Malmö presents the video work Mother’s Tongue.

It is a contemporary history of Chinese restaurants in Sweden that dissolves the boundaries

between fiction and reality, past and present.


.
The video work Mother’s Tongue (2018), by Lap-See Lam and Wingyee Wu, takes

viewers on a partially speculative journey back in time through the history of Sweden’s

Chinese restaurants. These restaurants have been a familiar feature of Swedish cities since

the late 1970s, and at the same time embody a foreign and exotic alternative to the familiar.

A first version of Mother’s Tongue was created as a mobile phone app and a walking tour of

Stockholm that took users to three places with ties to either current or former

Chinese restaurants.



In three chapters that play out in the past (1978), present (2018), and future (2058),

Mother’s Tongue tells stories that revolve around social, cultural, and technological clashes.

Language, identity, and life in a diaspora are explored through fictive monologues by three

generations of women. The work also sheds light on preconceptions of proximity to Chinese

culture that Chinese restaurants may create. The use of 3D modeling and computer animation

establishes a distance to the places described and underscores the Chinese restaurant’s role as

a scenography—a set design in which guests may expect an experience comparable to

traveling in a foreign country. At the same time, the Chinese restaurant functions as an entirely

real frame for the everyday lives many people are living, often in a new country.



Curator Andreas Nilsson



 modernamuseet.se


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