Artist in Residence: Alex Yam
Programme Curator: Louise Hung
The Young Wimbledon Artist in Residence programme brings young artists into Wimbledon Museum to explore its collections, develop new work and share ways of viewing local histories. The programme supports emerging artists in Merton, while creating opportunities for artists, volunteers and visitors to exchange knowledge, experiences and perspectives.
This year’s residency, Labels of Wonder, began with a simple question: what can we discover about a museum collection and its histories when our direct access to it is limited?
Many objects in Wimbledon Museum’s archives are carefully stored rather than permanently displayed. We may encounter them instead through catalogue entries, handwritten notes, labels, descriptions and stories shared through conversation. We invited artists to use these fragments as creative starting points — to research, question, imagine and make connections between the material they encountered and their own experiences.
Alex Yam began with descriptions of two 1920s dresses in the Museum’s collection. Their research into historical beading and embroidery developed into an exploration of everyday imagery, memory and home, moving between Merton and Hong Kong.
Alongside the residency, Louise Hung presents process work from her PhD research at Wimbledon Museum. Drawing on her own experience as a volunteer, she brings together everyday objects, documents and memories to explore relationships formed through the Museum, and how experiences of trust, care and belonging can extend beyond the institution itself.
The two projects move in different directions: Alex begins with fragments of the Museum’s collection and moves towards personal memories and places; Louise brings fragments of personal experience back into the Museum to be collected, described and encountered anew.
Together, the exhibition asks how people with different experiences and relationships to place can participate in making local histories: what do we choose to keep, what might otherwise go unseen, and who gets to contribute to the stories of a location?
Alex Yam
Alex primarily creates digital character illustrations. Their work explores identity through fashion and gender expression. They enjoy using bright colours, saturated lighting and foreshortened perspectives to emphasise the atmosphere of my illustrations. Their artwork often features eccentric hairstyles, accessories and clothing, taking inspiration from anime, novels, music, video games and fashion magazines. Alex also works in other media such as figurine making and acrylic painting.
Alex was born and raised in Hong Kong and moved to London five years ago. They have an education in architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, graduating in 2025. Alex has a fine arts background in traditional mediums like oil painting, acrylic painting and graphite sketching. They previously made artwork in the styles of surrealism and organic abstraction, with a focus on portraiture, figure drawing and cityscapes.
Instagram: @astralsunder
Louise Hung
Louise Hung is a Taiwan-born illustrator, educator and PhD researcher based in London. She does not live in Wimbledon, but since joining Wimbledon Museum as a volunteer in 2023, it has become an important part of her life. Through the Museum she has made close friends, including a few fellow volunteers who affectionately call themselves her “UK mums”, worked on projects, shared many cups of tea — and now occasionally cat-sits for two volunteers. Her current PhD research explores volunteering and participatory illustration in contemporary local museums, including how relationships formed through participation can shape a sense of belonging to place.