9 March 30–april 5, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Optimal Illusions All eyes are on Dallas artist Dan Lam. BY KENDALL MORGAN D an Lam’s sculptures look like they were dropped on Earth from another planet. Enchanting, other- worldly and vibrant, her art flops off shelving in the form of drips, as blobs that colonize walls with neon color and as squishes climbing into irides- cent towers. Crafted of recycled foam, polyurethane, acrylic paint and resin, each piece seems to possess a fantasy backstory and anthropomorphic charisma. The artist says natural forms may inspire her, but the true meaning of her work comes from within. “They do have personality, but it’s not on purpose,” Lam says. “There’s no narrative there. When I was doing the more blobby wall pieces, I did draw more directly from na- ture, but now I never want to inadvertently create some- thing I’ve seen. I think that’s why when people look at my work, they think there’s a hint of something organic like a slime mold or weird fungus, but it’s not that thing.” Still, Lam’s little aliens are personable and attractive enough to take her career from local spaces to blue-chip gal- leries, and from the collections of Demi Lovato, Gigi Hadid and 2 Chainz to the walls of Meow Wolf. Their appeal is in- stinctual and almost universal — so much so it was the egali- tarian platform of Instagram that allowed the then-aspiring sculptor to get on the art world’s radar. “For a gallery like ours, Instagram is a pretty vital resource,” says Ken Har- man Hashimoto, the owner and director of Hashimoto Contemporary, who repre- sents Lam in California and New York. “My business partner, Dasha Matsuura, discovered [her] work on- line in 2015 or 2016. When she posts, it sucks you in, even if you don’t quite un- derstand what you’re looking at. I think that’s one of the things that makes her so special: You can appreciate it both online and [in person], and it can resonate in both formats.” One could argue that Lam is an artist of her time: social media savvy (484K followers on Insta, 497K on TikTok), clever with color and a lot of fun to collect. From the very be- ginning, art seemed to be destiny for this Vietnamese wun- derkind. Born in 1988 in a refugee camp in Manila, Lam moved to Houston when she was a baby. An only child, she amused herself by drawing, building things and playing with melted wax. Her mother also had creative tendencies, and the por- traits she would make of her growing daughter were a high- light of Lam’s childhood. “I was so excited when it came to that time of year,” Lam recalls. “I loved watching her draw. She also had this job hand-embellishing baby objects, and she would take me to work with her, which was another pretty influential thing. Being a kid after school, I would watch all these ladies sit and paint and was obsessed with all the colors.” The family relocated to Dallas/Fort Worth when Lam was 8. She knew she wanted to pursue a creative career by the time she reached high school. “It’s funny because teenagers are so dramatic,” she says with a laugh. “I loved writing and still love it, and there was a split moment where I was like, ‘Am I going to be a writer, or am I going to be an artist?’ For some reason, it can’t be both. I picked pursuing art in high school.” Lam’s talent was evident even in those early days of sketching in AP art class at Plano West High School. Her for- mer classmate Liz Paris, now collections manager at the Mc- Nay Art Museum in San Antonio, says she saw something special in the artist’s aesthetic from the start. “From the time I first met Dan at the beginning of our senior year, she was really talented,” says Paris, who opened a show, Beyond Reality, featuring Lam’s work at the McNay this month. “The only difference was she was primarily working in 2D. But all the elements in the 2D work you see in her work today. A lot of her work had a very organic quality to it, and there was a little bit of a psychedelic influence. You saw these squiggly things go- ing on, and there were always bright colors. A lot of those primary elements made their way into her work as ▼ Culture Kathy Tran >> p10 “IT’S AMAZING TO SEE HER WORK WITH COLOR COMBINATIONS THAT DON’T EXIST IN NATURE BUT FEEL LIKE THEY SHOULD.” — HAN SANTANA-SAYLES, MEOW WOLF Dan Lam is a sculptor of otherworldly forms using paint, resin and foam.
