ManYee Lam
ManYee Lam, Silk Cocoon
performance, sculpture and video, 2011
ManYee Lam is a 47-year-old Chinese woman born and raised in Hong Kong, currently living in California, USA. After finishing university, she joined the advertising field and worked for international advertising companies like O&M and DDB Needham for 14 years. During the last 5 years of her advertising life, she also worked as a simultaneous interpreter for experiential workshops in the area of human potential development. At the same time, she got deeply involved in studying psychology. In 2000, she quit her job as Media Director to pursue the path of a facilitator for workshops dedicated to personal awareness and transformation. She currently conducts workshops all over Asia – Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea and Mexico.
Working as a facilitator in intensive personal growth workshops has given ManYee the opportunity to know and understand people from different cultures at a very deep level. Throughout the process, she has been touched over and over by people’s stories—their pain, their courage, and their sincere desire to be the best they can be.
As a facilitator, ManYee tries to reach people through words. As an artist, she wants to reach people through visual elements, which she believes can touch people in a different way that is beyond language. ManYee is currently studying the Master of Fine Art in California College of the Art in order to deepen her understanding of visual language.
The source of ManYee’s art practice comes from her interest in people, in particular the unconscious psychological make up. Through her works, she tries to investigate the unconscious force that governs who we are, how we feel and what we do, as well as how people negotiate and struggle with this unconscious power. The media she employs is not fixed, but called for by the idea. They range from sculpture, installation, video, photograph, painting, ink to animation.