Heiyi Tam is a Hong Kong-born artist based in London. Her practice explores memory, impermanence, and the uncertain space between recollection and imagination through a childlike way of seeing.

Working intuitively with layered washes, gestural mark-making and recurring organic forms through cycles of addition and erasure, her paintings bring East Asian ink sensibilities of gesture, spatial ambiguity and impermanence into dialogue with contemporary abstraction. Meaning often emerges through making rather than from a fixed narrative, with titles playing an integral role in that process and most often arriving after the composition. Playful, poetic and sometimes oddly specific, her titles introduce narrative and emotional associations that shift the relationship between language and image. References such as Easter eggs, hungry crocodiles and cereal box puzzles become points of association where memory, humour and imagination intersect.

Growing up in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at fifteen, Tam draws on cultural landscapes, flavours and sensory fragments without treating them as fixed narratives. Details are softened, exaggerated, displaced or reassembled as memory and imagination begin to blur, allowing the ordinary to slip into the surreal.

Tam has earned international recognition as a finalist for the 2026 Gilchrist-Fisher Award, exhibiting at Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London. She was shortlisted for the 14th Edition of The Signature Art Prize and was also a finalist for The Hari Art Prize (2024), judged by senior figures from White Cube and Collective Ending HQ. Previous accolades include being runner-up in the Tiepolo Blue Art Prize (2022), judged by art critic James Cahill and Maggi Hambling CBE.

Her work has also been acquired for Pan Macmillan’s London headquarters and selected for the Terrence Higgins Trust Auction at Christie’s, London. She is currently exhibiting in Woven Voices: Her Story in Art at 3812 Gallery, London.