Property Journal

Amy Ching-Yan Lam

From December 2021 to December 2022, artist and writer Amy Ching-Yan Lam kept a record of each time real estate, property or housing came up in conversation. She called this the Property Journal. Over the course of a year, neighborhood landmarks are demolished, politicians break promises, friends despair, and parents age. Mold appears to grow on Lam’s face moisturizer; as property organizes people’s lives, it also overtakes them. What began as a simple framework soon becomes an index of precarity, told through the indignities, dread, and dreamscapes of what we’re able to call ‘home’. Property Journal stands as a damning indictment of the permanent state of affairs known as the housing crisis.