Karena Lam ceramics took a new turn in August when she staged a pottery show on Tai Nan Street in Sham Shui Po, where galleries and cafes now sit side by side, and the neighborhood’s everyday life reshaped her artistic outlook.
Beloved by audiences as a leading actress, Karena Lam (林嘉欣) has embraced pottery so fully that she says it feels like a second life. She will collaborate with Taiwanese floral artist Liao Hao-zhe (廖浩哲) on a vessel and floral installation show in June next year. Lam recalled that her first outreach to Liao was a simple Instagram direct message, a gesture she said captures how grounded her approach to projects has become.
Karena Lam ceramics: radical slow craft
The Lam we know did not come through a formal art academy, she forged a path through practice and curiosity, translating an actor’s instinct into a maker’s impulse. Her method can feel impulsive, a flash of inspiration followed immediately by action.
When she learned of a free window in her filming schedule she flew to the Kasama and Mashiko pottery villages in Japan, a trip that required about four hours by air and three hours by road from Tokyo. She stayed with a longtime friend and potter, Akio Ega (額賀章夫), and under his guidance she spent 11 days pulling and shaping clay at his studio.
“There is a difference between having formal training in ceramics and not having it,” she said, reflecting on artists such as Picasso who took up clay late in life. “With glazes and firing the result often surprises you, it lands outside what you expected. For me, I do not make pottery at scale, I make it to express an inner world, and I am willing to accept millimeter flaws in technique.”
Lam traces her start in clay to the pandemic, when she began accompanying her daughter to ceramics classes. What began as driving her child to lessons became an experiment in making clay, and she fell for the material’s tactile quality. “Clay remembers, it responds to the maker’s emotions, memories, and thought,” she said. “It is connected to drama in a way. Clay does not serve me, we are in a relationship of listening and response, action and reaction.”
Speed and pause
Lam’s ceramics studio has no Wi Fi and little phone reception, a deliberate retreat she said helps her work. “Hong Kong moves fast, but that speed is a good place to train the spirit, because if you seek slowness elsewhere the development feels expected. When you find slowness inside speed the contrast is more vivid,” she explained.
In recent years Lam has staged several pottery shows in Hong Kong, choosing neighborhoods such as Sheung Wan, Tai Nan Street in Sham Shui Po, and Book Street in Tai Hang. She said community settings give her work a human temperature and a real response from everyday life.
“I feel drawn to entering communities, the old neighborhoods have a warmth to them. Often before you are seated a neighbor is already offering you hot milk tea saying ‘this is for you.’ Making tableware and vessels is part of life. In acting and in pottery I practice self expression and observation, and the community gives you the truest feedback. Art is not an arcane subject, a flipped over rubbish bin or gloves hanging in an alley can be seen as installation, and the thing that makes us look may itself be art,” she said.
Lam does not aspire to be an artist in the ivory tower sense, she said. Her ceramics brand, Ceramics by Karena Lam, funnels proceeds after costs to Hong Kong charities, she noted, adding a social purpose to the practice.
Hands and senses
Four years into ceramics, Lam said the work has left her hands marked and changed, and that those hands now open a new sensory channel for her acting. “I feel as if my fingers have eyes,” she reflected, citing her role in the film World of Depravity as a turning point in how she senses craft and performance.
She said pottery has become intertwined with her life. Her daughter has joked about whether Lam loves her or clay more, a question Lam said she meets with a laugh and a muddled answer. The choices between family, acting, and ceramics create a constant negotiation she called both messy and vital.
“I am a person in motion, I do not want to remain in any single phase of myself. The less satisfied I am the hungrier I become for new projects, new roles, and new shows. My colleagues must be tired of hearing me talk about clay, but I am never done learning,” she said with evident appetite.
Executive Producer: Angus Mok
Photographer: Leung Mo
Art Direction: Leung Mo and Mimi Kong
Styling: Mimi Kong, assisted by Candice Yu
Videographer: Kason Tam and Alvin Kong
Video Edit: Kason Tam and Alvin Kong
Interview: Ms. A
Makeup: Will Wong
Hair: Kristy Cheung and Ricky Lam
Wardrobe: Louis Vuitton
