Lam Lok-san

Lam Lok-san (林樂新) is a Hong Kong-based printmaker and senior technical officer at the Hong Kong Open Printshop (HKOP), the city's longest-running non-profit communal print studio. Originally trained on the mainland, he completed an undergraduate course at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, where he specialized in printmaking. His studio practice and his administrative role at HKOP both centre on traditional and contemporary woodblock print processes.

During and after his Beijing training, Lam built early exhibition credentials in two of the most important national-level printmaking shows in China. His prints were selected for the 20th National Printmaking Exhibition at the Heilongjiang Art Museum in 2013 — one of the chief survey exhibitions of contemporary Chinese printmaking — and were subsequently shown in the Guanlan International Printmaking Biennale in 2015 at the China Printmaking Museum, the principal Chinese venue for international print exchange. These appearances place his early work within the post-2010 generation of CAFA-trained Chinese printmakers who have moved between mainland exhibitions and the Hong Kong studio circuit.

Since relocating to Hong Kong, Lam has worked as a senior technical officer at HKOP, where the role combines fine-art collaboration, print production for visiting artists, and education. HKOP, founded in 2000 and registered as a charity in 2012, is the principal community print studio in Hong Kong and runs a public press programme, publication releases, exhibitions, and visiting-artist editions. Lam's responsibilities include assisting on collaborative print projects, supporting incoming artists' editioning, and contributing to HKOP's youth and adult education programmes.

Lam's recent woodblock print series 'So Close, So Far' (2024) marks his most visible Hong Kong-period output to date. The series consists of relief prints on Somerset 100% cotton paper and includes a large landscape composition (Bridge, 38 × 93 cm) and two smaller upright/horizontal compositions (Toy 1 and Toy 2, both 33 × 26 cm). The works are issued in editions of six and use two- to four-block colour runs that reflect his interest in the architectural mid-distance and in objects of everyday life — bridges, toys — that operate as miniature studies of urban Hong Kong.

Alongside his exhibition practice, Lam is part of the broader HKOP community that includes founding members such as Cheung Chung Chu, alumni and visiting artists like Wong Ho Ching, and the 2024 fundraising exhibition cohort featured in South China Morning Post coverage of the studio. Within that ecology, Lam represents the technical-staff strand of contemporary Hong Kong printmaking — artists whose practice is materially and operationally embedded in the studio infrastructure that supports the wider Hong Kong print scene.

His prints are sold through HKOP's commercial arm, Print Art Contemporary, where they are presented bilingually in English and Traditional Chinese with full disclosure of paper, edition size, and colour-run count. As of 2024–2025 his commercially circulated works remain limited to the 'So Close, So Far' series, and his profile within Hong Kong contemporary printmaking is most legible through the HKOP studio context rather than through individual gallery representation.