Property Journal - Amy Ching-Yan Lam

‘Around this time last year, I had a birthday astrology reading where the reader said they could tell, just by looking at my chart, that I had run away from home when I was seventeen. They said that this year would be a revisiting of that event, but it would happen in a completely different way.’

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, neighbourhood landmarks are demolished, politicians break promises, friends despair, and parents age. Mould appears to grow on Lam’s face moisturiser; as property organises 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’.

Tender, fierce, and mordantly funny, Property Journal is a damning indictment of the permanent state of affairs known as the housing crisis.

Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, Baby Book (2023, Brick Books), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry, and Looty Goes to Heaven (2022, Eastside Projects). From 2006 to 2020 she was in the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and was born in Hong Kong.

Book Works, 2024
Softcover, 216pp 
180 x 127mm