Kenneth Lam’s Photography Carries Generations

The Hong Kong-born, London-based artist asks us to consider what is left unsaid through food, and the traditions passed down on the dining table.

Italian futurists in the early 20th century were the first to believe that food was the ultimate artistic medium. You saw food, smelled it, heard its preparation, touched it with your utensils—and then you tasted it. They made deep fried roses and milk drinks illuminated by green lights because to them, the kitchen required as much craft as the studio. Beauty could be found on the dining table as often as in the theater or the museum.

If it’s in the restaurant that food becomes art, it is also where photographer Ken Lam had his most formative artistic experiences. “I grew up a lot around food. My dad’s a chef, and my childhood was all above a Chinese restaurant [in London],” says the Hong Kong-born artist. “It was a really busy place to grow up. There were more than 10 staff living with us, and we were always having really large meals with a lot of people.” His work as an artist doesn't stray too far from his origins: Many of his works depict food, from pumpkins to freshly caught fish, all artfully arranged. They’re found in the pages of the Financial Times, South China Morning Post, The Sunday Times, and GQ.

“[Food] is beautiful to look at,” the 30-year-old photographer says. But taking the Italian futurist’s mantra one step further: “There is a lot left unsaid through food. Eating at the table as a family, food becomes a common language. It’s how tradition is passed down.”

These subjects are explored in Legacies, a 2020 photography collection depicting objects of all kinds on dining tables—and the tensions that arise when they share space with one another. One photograph in particular, titled “Breaking Traditions,” depicts blue and white Chinese porcelain in symphonic disarray. Rice noodles overflow from cups. Plates and bowls are scattered, some shattered and broken. In the photo’s accompanying text, an unnamed narrator addresses Kenneth: “He’s a traditional man, that's why he collects traditional things, but you like to break things, don't you?”

“It’s symbolic of how I’d upset my dad and his beliefs, or the traditions he’d uphold,” he says. “I’m expected to care for and handle these previous antique Chinese vases, but instead I’ve broken them.”

Ken’s struggles to carry traditions and maintain generational memory are universal. In Asian cities, where modernity came in fast and full swing, the gap between generations is especially large. The “Asian Miracle” sustained rapid growth in major Asian cities from the early 1960s through the 1990s. In Hong Kong, it transformed the colonial textile economy into a highly-educated, economically diversified city and a bastion of neoliberal progress.

“My father used to live in makeshift housing in the mountains. After every typhoon, he’d have to find a new home,” a friend from Hong Kong once told me. “But one generation later, he's able to send me to boarding school and university in the UK.” No wonder tradition and memory, both as delicate as porcelain, are quickly destroyed by modernity’s unforgiving tides.

But the other photos in Legacies tell a different story, and motifs of the old and modern—or the decaying and the new—fuse together seamlessly throughout the collection. In the other pieces, Western soda cans share food with chopsticks, red envelopes with freshly minted paper bills. Freshly picked flowers decorate a rooster’s un-butchered carcass; half-eaten lychees are lined alongside delicate, uncracked quail eggs.

I like to think that a Chinese family dinner table is no less harmonious: Grandparents, parents, children eat together, fusing into one unifying whole through a meal. The old and the young come together in commune.

Traditions might be broken on the dining table, but it is nonetheless a place where generations divided try to meet eye-to-eye, undisturbed. At this site of both closeness and conflict, Kenneth believes we can find more in common with our parents and grandparents than we might think we have.

“My parents were immigrants. They moved to a different country and didn’t speak English. They went into uncharted territory,” he says. The uncertainty of an artist’s path, he believes, is no different: “You’re kind of doing the same.”

Just like his parents, he once opened a Chinese restaurant (though this time, in Berlin) in 2024. As the head chef, he was tasked with cooking Peking duck, his father’s signature dish at his family restaurant in London. “I remember feeling like I was continuing his legacy, like he was passing his torch down to me,” he says. “But by the end of it, I was so burnt out and tired.”

“One of my friends said to me, ‘You’re not a chef, you’re not your father,’” he recalls. “‘You can continue your family’s legacy through art.’” This is also a mission he’s trying to continue in his photography today.

Ken captures portraits of his late grandmother, preserving her life and memory in a series of photos titled End of An Era (2020). Snippets of her daily life—her objects, and the food she ate—are captured in poised stills. In the collection’s main piece, his grandmother is wrapped in a thick white blanket. She’s innocent, baby-like, and in a romanticized memory of her: “Smiling, wrapped up in a giant duvet.”

They never shared a common language. Kenneth’s Cantonese is “broken,” as was his grandmother’s English—but where words failed, actions reigned. “For my grandmother, I never said ‘I love you,’ but it’s all documented through photographs,” he says. “But she didn’t need me to say anything. I think she knew 100 percent how much I loved her.”

Only art, says German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt, gives humans a “premonition of immortality.” While many of Kenneth’s older relatives continue to age, they are clearly still very much alive in the photos he creates. His recent collection at the Museum of the Home in London now goes beyond the dining table. Instead, it captures rooms, and what memories and personal histories they immortalize. Titled Still Living, the exhibit is showing until June 2025. He doesn’t have a clear vision for what exactly he himself wants to leave behind, or how he imagines his legacy, but his end-goal is simple.

“ What I’d like to leave behind is like a visual representation of  my family, or the people around me,” he says. “Hopefully it’s beautiful, and people relate to it.”