As of tomorrow, Jaffa Lam is no longer the academic head of Hong Kong Art School (HKAS). It's a place she's called home for the last 24 years, where she began as a part-time technician at the sculpture studio. She taught her final class last Thursday.

In the same week, she made appearances at Art Central and Art Basel 2025, where her Mobile Wisdom was on display – a rainbow coloured bookshelf-cum-hammock made of recycled umbrella. Last weekend, she traveled to her exhibition in Shenzhen – her first solo museum show in over a decade featuring a handful of her residency projects from the last two decades. 

While colleagues lament her departure, Jaffa is eager to resume her role solely as an artist, free to continue her life-long mission of making art with marginal groups and free from the corporate duties that rewarded her with a stable salary to support her late mother's hefty medical bills. Ambitiously, she also wanted to throw herself into the deep end and see if her cross-disciplinary sculptures would sink or float in a city where they are scantily collected or understood.

At 52 years old, Jaffa is still a rebel and dare-devil at heart.

Though Jaffa's name is no stranger amongst corporations, museums, exhibitions, art festivals and artist residencies from Denmark to France, Germany to Japan, she only sold her first gallery piece at the age of 49 in a group show at Axel Vervoordt – serendipitously a year before she'd vow to "burn all the art pieces" and likely give up her art career had they remained unappreciated, collecting dust in her studio in Fo Tan.

"I wanted to burn them all in front of the Hong Kong Museum of Art because they never take my work," she laughs, half-jokingly.

The positive response from the group show saw a solo exhibition, also at the Wong Chuk Hang-based gallery, in 2022. Amidst her signature pieces made from upcycled wood and transformed industrial waste, Jaffa deliberately kept a gallery wall riddled with marks where "really expensive paintings" previously hung. After the exhibition, she pleaded to remove and include the wall as a part of the collection. Understandably, the staff brushed her off: what was she thinking?

Then, gallery director Boris Vervoordt visited: he looked at the wall, toyed with her outrageous request for a few minutes and, much to the staff's surprise, said yes. The wall currently sits in Axel Vervoordt's archives while a work from the show – A Piece of Good Water III – found its home in M+ museum.

"What can I say, I am a rebel: I like to challenge people and institutions," says Jaffa.

Such clout to go against the tides is the undercurrent of Jaffa's life. It peeled her away from her study of Chinese calligraphy and painting during her Bachelor of Arts, after a senior had told her she must learn under a master's tutelage for three decades before she could make a name for herself. Impatient, she shifted to Chinese rubbings, and, in the process of making its slabs, contemporary art.

The Bet that Changed Her Life
One night after she landed in New York for what was a predominantly research trip in 2007 – seven years after attaining her Master of Fine Arts and Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong – she found respite at a Fujianese restaurant that served food from the region where she called home prior to the age of 12. Feeling nostalgic, she struck up a conversation with the owner, who couldn't fathom the possibility of a petite lady from his hometown as a successful artist.

"'People from Fujian don't become artists', he said," recalls Jaffa. "He'd believe me only if I showed in Chelsea (New York's art hub and home of the Gagosian Gallery)."

She won the bet in just five months' time; and as a thank-you gift for the owner's motivation, she custom-made a few pieces for the restaurant. One of the most notable was a lit-up neon sign that read "we cook art here". Though the Chinese restaurant is now a cafe and the owner is long gone, the experience bookended her search for the kind of artist she had wanted to be: one that doesn't just work for communities, but with them to make art that bears meaning and connection  – elements she, till this day, still value much more than pocketing big bucks. 

Such was her groundbreaking debut in Art Basel 2023's Encounters section – a 14-metre canopy of recycled umbrella fabric that's anchored onto six sculptures of industrial trolleys-cum-chairs. Titled Trolley Party, the piece was done in partnership with the craftswomen of the Hong Kong Women's Workers Association and highlights themes of unseen labour, identity and collectiveness of the city.

The new-found spotlight pleased Jaffa, but not as much as seeing the children of the craftswomen playing under the mammoth piece that their mothers helped to create.

Admittedly, her motivation to work with varied communities stems from her trying childhood. After leaving a home of natural beauty in Fujian for Hong Kong in 1985, she and her family of four lived in an illegal structure on a rooftop in Kwun Tong's industrial area, where crime and discrimination were routine amongst new immigrants struggling with Cantonese. She was bullied in school and her parents were almost always working. To contribute, she took a cash-in-hand job at a garment factory, where she cut loose threads off the finished clothing, sometimes earning less than HK$1 per dozen pieces. Since she was underaged, she was shooed to hide whenever officers from the labour department came to conduct checks.

"The discrimination really hit me," says Jaffa. "Making art with these communities and seeing the women and the children realize their success at an event they'd otherwise never attend really helped release my anger and trauma." 

Despite her success, she still laments the limited power of artists in society without the money to spread their messages. While she's fortunate the galleries she's worked with aren't hooked on sales figures, she's not naive to the challenges of selling and understanding sizable sculptures in Hong Kong; but she's here to make the fight, free from the financial stability she's enjoyed for the past 24 years.

"People think I'm leaving HKAS because I've earned enough money, but that's far from the case. I want to test myself and the market: I've given myself a five-year timeline since selling my first piece in 2022, so we'll see."