Heiyi Tam is a Hong Kong-born artist based in London.

Her practice explores the fluidity of impermanence and memory, often through a childlike gaze. Working intuitively with layered washes, gestural mark-making and her signature organic bean-like forms, she merges Eastern ink traditions with contemporary abstraction. While her titles carry a sense of play and child-like wonder, alluding to imagery like Easter eggs that were never found, hungry crocodiles, and cereal box puzzles, her compositions often suggest quiet tension, creating a subtle dissonance between what is read and what is felt. Her work lives between reality and imagined spaces, where layered narratives unfold.

Raised in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at 15, Tam’s work reflects a subtle interplay of cultural landscapes, cuisines and personal mythologies. Her paintings carry metaphorical imagery and poetic, often diaristic titles, drawing on flavours, memories and sensory fragments. Informed by a background in philosophy and psychology, she engages with how memory shapes imagination, creating fictional realms that hover between lived experience and the surreal. Her work opens a space of poetic tension, where memory and imagination gently blur.

Tam has earned international recognition as a finalist for the Gilchrist-Fisher Award 2026, shortlisted for the 14th Edition of The Signature Art Prize, and longlisted for ArtEvol 2025 at Saatchi Gallery, London. In 2024, she was also a finalist for The Hari Art Prize (London), judged by senior figures from White Cube and Collective Ending HQ. Previous accolades include winning The Other Art Fair: New Futures Award (2023), runner-up in the Tiepolo Blue Art Prize (2022, judged by James Cahill and Maggi Hambling CBE), and placing in the Top 4 of the Landmark Art Prize (2022). Tam holds an MA in Art and Science from Central Saint Martins, graduating with First Class Honours in 2023.

Recent exhibitions include Housewarming, 3812 Gallery, Hong Kong; The Treasure Art Fair with 3812 Gallery, London; and ADDENDUM, No. 20 Arts Gallery, London, UK.