Miley Cyrus follows her: Dan Lam, Vietnamese-American artist whose drippy, trippy sculptures can sell for up to US$40,000 a piece
- Lam’s striking technicolour sculptures are influenced by ’90s children’s television and a wish to counteract the more reserved aspects of her heritage
- She has nearly half a million followers on Instagram and is preparing for a solo show in Portland in July, and another in New York in December
Dan Lam can put to rest any doubts as to whether a social media presence can launch the career of an artist.
In 2015, the Vietnamese-American artist was living in the small oil city of Midland, in the centre of the US state of Texas where “nothing was going on”, when she started posting photos of her work on Instagram.
“I would share something, and then a handful of other accounts would reshare it, and then someone commented on one of my posts that Miley Cyrus was following me,” Lam says.
“I was shocked that my work reached that far, how widespread it was, and whose eyes were on it. It was how most galleries found me.”
All of this was helped, of course, by Lam’s striking visual aesthetic.
Gloopy, drippy, trippy, technicolour sculptures in polyurethane foam treated with resin and acrylic are her stock-in-trade – including a recent 15ft by 15ft (4.6 metre by 4.6 metre) installation she describes as “looking like a rainbow melting off a wall”.
