Ronald Lam

19 Beds

A landscape of 18 beds sat on the ground filled with topsoil. With red silk thread, a dead or dying house plant is suspended above each terrain of earth. The 19th bed, elevated from the ground holding two live plants.A spanning installation that hugs the ground with a range of constructed wooden frames in various conventional bed sizes. Each frame is filled with a mound of soil, making up 19 earthly structures, lit by atmospheric soft lighting. Above each mound, a single red silk thread suspends a houseplant by its roots, their very tips hanging mere millimetres above the soil. These elements, in material and conceptual relation, discuss the nuances of belonging, yearning and the ever-shifting foundations of identity caused by displacement.Yearning is also found in the small details of the installation — the red silk thread points to my Chinese heritage, which I struggle to embody as a person of diaspora. The tropical houseplants encompass a yearning for ownership, property, and household — a millennial trait, or so I am told. Water droplets hang in the air as humidity, a smell of fertility when in fact all plants are shrivelled and dry — the air still yearns for growth. Even the placement of the beds, non-orthogonal, pushed against into a corner, many unreachable, now become a singular landscape of memory that can only now be accessed in the wanting of nostalgia.

“A personal story of the artist wrestling with the concept of belonging. While this functions as an autobiographical landscape of experience, it also discusses the hardships of human relationships with place and environment, and how this can possibly be reconnected in the future. A failure to connect, after all, defines connection as much as connecting. The position taken in relation to this is a charged tribute to yearning. Yearning is a powerful, emotional element that encapsulates that same question of belonging and of the space that never came to fruition as a home.”