| Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Tina Lam

Artistat Cornell University
headshot
Montreal,
Canada
Focus area: Astronomy, Space

Tina Lam is an artist-scientist-wanderer who was born in Montréal/Tio'tia:ke/Mooniyang and raised by Cambodian-Chinese refugee parents. Her sculptures, land-art interventions, and installations explore physical and metaphorical transformation, hybridity and exchange to interrogate the vastness of the universe and its enigmas born from the interconnection between humanity and the beyond-human. 
Guided by her scientific background and intuition, she channels various forces through her body to arrest poetic gestures into materials via chemical oxidation, reduction, mechanical deformation and aesthetic sensibility. She melds materials ranging from the fundamental constituents of the Earth – minerals and ores and the biomass of wood - to their industrially processed states – paper, steel, aluminum, copper and glass. 
Transformative forces resonate with her culturally uprooted, diasporic upbringing. That experience of alterity and adaptation is embodied the haptic in her work. The latter serves as a vehicle to introspect on the relationship between a material’s surface and the immeasurable hidden potential in its underlying depth. Metamorphosis thus becomes synonymous with resilience, growth and hybridity. 
Her work has been funded by numerous grants and awards, notably from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Quebec Council for the Arts and Letters. Recent exhibitions include “A Long Toast” at Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn), “How to: Build an Ocean'' at Jack Hanley Gallery (NYC), “Ensemble” at Eastern Bloc (Montreal), “Scale” at T6 Gallery (Toronto), and “Mirror:miroir” at centre articule (Montreal). She earned an MFA from Cornell University, a BFA from Concordia University, and a PhD from McGill University.