He established his international career through the art scene in New York, where he lived for ten years, after finishing studies at Goldsmiths, London (1987–92) and at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (1992–94).
Identity, space and place are recurring concerns in Åsdam's approach, which explore the way we live in the city today, as well as the thoughts, references, desires and conflicts that drive us.
His investigation of the usage and perception of public urban spaces, including their structures of political power and authority, takes the diverse form of audio, film, video, photography and architecture.
Though expressed in very diverse forms, Åsdam's main interests remain consistent; they concern the manner in which each individual constructs and negotiates his or her identity while bounded by the rules and organizations of contemporary society.
[1] In the cinematic field, Åsdam has developed a new kind of cinema, using the resources of spatial and place-oriented discourses from the Fine Arts context as a strategy within film.
Newly built outer areas around the cities, construction sites, institutional and office buildings, transitory places, between growth and collapse, marked by quasi-contradictory processes of economic progress and development of slums.
In a series of installations, The Care of the Self (1999–2007), Åsdam has created nighttime parks with a dark lush interior in an architecture of trees, plants, grass and flowers.
Here Åsdam blurs the psychological and physical boundaries between the viewer and the nighttime park of the city; the temporary space for teenage hangouts, drug trafficking and sexual cruising.