Dora Lam
Lives and works in London, UK
Lam's paintings draw on women found in colonial and personal archives. She isolates the face — individuation as refusal of type — extracting each figure from her original photographic context and relocating her within geometric spaces, environments constructed through a diasporic logic: the minimum needed to suggest a place while refusing fixed geography, or time. She works on dark grounds with atomised paint, the faces meticulously rendered to acquire a surface that appears untouched by hand — precision becomes both an act of sincerity and a confrontation with what can never be known. Gesture, drawn line, and fields of colour interrupt the authority of the archival image, creating openings for play, frivolity, and refusal; the paintings become containers for misbehaving units of history — stories, behaviours, and people that slip between what is recorded and what is lived. Dora Lam is currently completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, supported by the Cass Art Scholarship. She was shortlisted for the Chadwell Award 2026, and was previously awarded the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST) Award. She has exhibited at the ICA, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and Museum of the Home, and has given talks at Tate Liverpool, Museum of the Home, and City University.
EDUCATION
2026 MA Painting, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2021 Postgraduate Diploma Fine Art, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2005 BSc Business Computing Systems, City University, London, UK
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2026 'London Writes Itself,' LBF Contemporary, London, UK (Group)
2026 'At 5am, I Woke Up.,' FILET, London, UK (forthcoming)
2026 RCA 2026 Show, Royal College of Art, London, UK (Group)
2026 'Ongoing,' Noho Showrooms, London, UK (Group)
2026 'Entanglements,' Annex by Koppel Projects, London, UK (Group)
2025 'The Last Salon,' Old Waiting Room, Peckham, London, UK (Group)
2025 'Untold,' AMP Gallery, London, UK (Group)
2023 'Not Too Sweet,' London Short Film Festival, ICA, London, UK (Group)
2023 'Uncovering Vietnamese Archives,' Museum of the Home, London, UK (Group)
2023 'ALTAR-NATIVE,' Ugly Duck, London, UK (Group)
2023 The Navigator Project, Fitzrovia Gallery, London, UK (Group)
2021 Grayson Perry's Art Club, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol, UK (Group)