Para Site

Aug 4 – Sep 20

Artist-in-Residence: Sam Lui

Courtesy of Sam Lui｜圖片由呂康玲提供

Para Site is thrilled to welcome Hong Kong-based artist Sam Lui for a two-month residency (4 August – 20 September 2025) in its tenth-floor space.

As the third iteration of Para Site’s on-site residency programme, Lui probes her ongoing project ‘Wendy’s Wok World’—a narrative-driven performance of wok cooking as an exploration of concepts of purity, discipline and absolutism. Through the constructed persona of Wendy, an apprentice devoted to mastering the exacting philosophy of traditional Cantonese wok cooking, Lui examines how ‘authority’ is internalised and performed in cultural practices.

During the residency, Lui will spend time developing her new artist book—a reflective and archival project that translates ‘Wendy’s Wok World’ into print. The residency will serve as a space for writing, dialogue, and shared thinking, inviting the public into the process through discursive formats such as book club, group discussions, and gathering events. Additionally, open studio hours will be held every Thursday from 4–6 PM, when Lui will be available in the studio to meet and chat with the public.

Continuing Para Site’s commitment to experimentation and community-building, Lui’s residency deploys the tenth-floor space as a porous site for research and storytelling, where narrative form, embodied practice, and critical reflection simmer side by side.

This iteration of the residency programme is organised by Yuanyu Li, in collaboration with Jessie Kwok.

About

Sam Lui is a Hong Kong artist whose ongoing project ‘Wendy’s Wok World’ is a character- and performance-driven exploration into ideas of purity and absolutism, using the medium of food—specifically the principled practice of Cantonese wok cooking—as its core. 

For Lui, wok cooking is a discipline that demands precision, timing, and control. Through her alter ego Wendy, a devoted wok apprentice, Lui constructs a narrative in which cooking becomes both a ritual and a philosophy. In striving to master these techniques, Wendy and her every movement become the embodiment of an absolute system. 

From 2020 to 2024, Lui hosted studio dinners at her family’s soy sauce factory, offering an intimate, informal experience of the project. ‘Wendy’s Wok World’ has been presented at Ghost 2565 in Bangkok (2022), as a supporting event for Lap-See Lam’s exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York (2023), and as a karaoke bar night at Art Basel, Basel (2024).