15 October - 6 November 2026
Opening celebration: Thursday 15 October, 5-7pm

‘Now, Hong Kong people are to run Hong Kong. That is a promise, and that is the unshakable destiny.’ — Chris Patten, Last Governor of Hong Kong at the Handover Ceremony in 1997.

The Unshakable Destiny is a five-year modular moving image project on the spectres of Hong Kong. An exploration of memory, site and cinema, the trilogy contemplates art-making in the diaspora as a witness to the slippery political context of a homeland from afar. Expansive in format and storytelling, _2101 (2021), Reprise / Release (2023) and Retrograde (2025) present a necessarily incomplete story of post-2019 Hong Kong diaspora. Always on the periphery, the trilogy shapeshifts as its homeland transforms, moving from a disappearing culture to its haunting and cyclical returns. 

A city with a history of multiplicity, cultural theorist Akbar Abbas described Hong Kong as a ‘culture of disappearance’ at the time of the sovereignty handover of Hong Kong in 1997. He observed that Hong Kong as a city without agency, created a visual culture that was most potent when facing threats of vanishing. In an attempt to capture this fleeting cultural re-emergence of visibility following the 2019 protests, these films fabricated memories that echoed the anxieties of the time from within and afar, witnessing from the perspectives of diaspora. As the trilogy progressed, these films became records of a politically and culturally transformative time. Designed to be viewed in a modular format, the films can either be presented together or independently, linearly in a cinema or in an installation. Always fragmented and on the periphery, the variation in viewing format is part of the enquiry of multiplicity and instability in the diasporic experience. This trio of films embodied poetry and cinematic language influenced by Hong Kong cinema and ‘Hong Kong in cinema’ in a push and pull of colonial gaze upon a disappearing city. 

The trilogy opened with the unshakable destiny_2101 (2021), a 16mm film and an ode to cinematic images that have shaped the representation of Hong Kong both from within and beyond the community. It drew focus on the tensions and misalignments between histories and cinematic tropes, colonial gaze and the migrant body. The film reflected on the aesthetics of Wong Kar Wai cinema and Asian-Futurism, with protest symbolism hidden in plain sight, as a response to censorship. While the project was set to challenge the colonial nostalgia of Hong Kong in cinema, the film gazes upon memories and traumatic events where the personal meets the collective in a cycle of devastation, contemplation and hope. 

This was followed by Reprise / Release (2023), a feverish dream of nostalgia and grief. It takes the audience on a journey to its past, returning to a homeland that no longer exists, a memory now reserved only for cinema. Reprise is a series of dream-like sequences, creating haunting fragments of a disjointed narrative in an expansive and speculative world, a metaphor for an increasingly diasporic Hong Kong community. Cultural scholar Esther M.K. Cheung described Hong Kong as a ‘spectral city’ in cinema, where it is ‘about what is half seen, allegorically seen, or quickly seen.’ These echoes from the past haunt our present in a way that is impermanent, highlighting the gaps and slippages of the city’s historical narratives with their ghosty presence. Were they dreams, or did the events actually happen? Reprise (2023) expanded on this space between fiction and facts, memory and re-creation, while Release (2023) portrayed the decay of memory itself, together they responded to the hauntological language of Hong Kong cinema to examine diasporic nostalgia as spectres. 

Retrograde (2025) concludes the trilogy with a two-channel film that returns to the sites as the artist and the performer confront the rapid political shifts in the city they once called home. Partly scripted and partly a documentary, the spectres from the past return to multiply, fragmentise and refract the narratives, as a response to Akbar Abbas’ observation of Hong Kong’s culture of disappearance. Through remembering, rehearsing and re-enacting, the performer and the artist negotiate their relationship to Hong Kong, alongside the city’s asymmetries. Against a backdrop that is personal and political, the work interrogates the opacity of the diaspora artist in grief for their homeland. The destiny is always a return, even when it is slippery. Seeing the sites quickly, allegorically, and partially, Retrograde / 逆⾏ is a conclusion that signals towards an uncertain future from the periphery, shapeshifting from a disappearing culture to its haunting and cyclical returns. 

Nikki Lam is an artist, filmmaker and curator based between Naarm and Hong Kong. Her practice spans moving image, text, performance, curation and publishing—as discursive and fragmented forms to think about the time we live in. She sees these forms as anchors for understanding migratory and diasporic experiences. Her current research speculates the diaspora artist as a ghost in multiple worlds.

Nikki’s work has been shown widely across Australia and internationally, most recently at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2025), Sydney Film Festival (2025), Brent Biennial, London (2025), Primavera: Australian Young Artists 2023 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, Melbourne Now (2023) at National Gallery of Victoria, Only the future revisits the past (2024) at Centre for Contemporary Photography and Current Plans, Hong Kong (2022). 

Nikki is co-director of Hyphenated Projects, an award winning artist-led network that nurtures practice in Asian diasporas, and co-founded Slow Burn Books, an art publisher and research project that circulates independent publications from Asia and its diaspora. These projects focus on neighbouring dialogues between Asian diaspora and the Asia Pacific region through artist residencies, independent publishing and collaborative projects. 

Nikki’s upcoming solo exhibition will be at Northing Space, Bergen, Norway (2027). Currently, Nikki is a development resident at Arts House CultureLAB (2026-27), for her new work fish, ghost, goddess.