Annyen Lam - Paper-Cuts

Annyen Lam is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice operates in paper-cutting, installation and printmaking. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from OCAD University (2012) as well as the Medal for Printmaking (2012). She is also the recipient of the Don Phillips Scholarship from Open Studio (2013) and the Visual Artists: Emerging Grant awarded by the Ontario Arts Council (2015). Based in Toronto, Lam has exhibited in Toronto, Montreal, Japan, Russia and The Netherlands, as well as a number of art fairs including Art Toronto, Love Art Fair 2015 (Toronto), Art on Paper Miami 2015, Art on Paper NYC 2016, Papier Montreal 2015 and 2016 and Art with Heart (A.G.O) 2016. The pieces in Paper-cuts depict environments that play with perception and fictitious space. Combining printmaking with hand-cut paper, Lam explores botanical and architectural forms as a means to investigate themes of escapism, tranquility, domesticity and the natural world. Lam’s oasean environments are translated through her medium of “drawing with a knife” in the reductive practice of paper cutting. These places are both real and imagined, blurring the lines between the absurd and the factual, the organic and the constructed. The resulting works reveal a hybrid narrative, allowing our consciousness to rest somewhere between what we recognize, what we know and what may become.