Heiyi Tam is a Hong Kong-born artist based in London. Her practice explores memory and impermanence through a childlike gaze.

Working intuitively with layered washes, gestural mark-making and her signature organic bean-like forms, she merges Eastern ink sensibilities with contemporary abstraction. Tam emphasises the role of titles within her process, using them to introduce playful, poetic and sometimes oddly specific narrative fragments that sit in subtle tension with the image, such as Easter eggs, hungry crocodiles, and cereal box puzzles.

Growing up in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at fifteen, Tam draws on cultural landscapes, flavours and sensory memory to build paintings that hover between the remembered and the imagined. Informed by a background in philosophy and psychology, her work engages with perception, creating emotionally resonant spaces where the everyday slips into the surreal.

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) and being runner-up in the Tiepolo Blue Art Prize (2022), judged by art critic James Cahill and Maggi Hambling CBE.