Finding Clarity with Distance: Interview with Heidi Lau
By Jennifer S. Li
Portrait of HEIDI LAU in her New York studio.
Heidi Lau was born in Oakland, California, and raised in Macau, but it wasn’t until she moved to New York City, where she currently lives and works, that she began to gain a fuller understanding of where she came from. Her craggy, ruinous tabletop and large-scale ceramic sculptures are drawn from her own family history and to a rapidly changing Macau. Growing up, she regularly attended Taoist temples with her grandmother, who was dedicated by Lau’s great-grandmother to be the goddaughter of Yan Luo Wang, the guardian of the gates of hell. These abstract ideas of an afterlife, which seemed quaint in childhood, have gained a renewed resonance for Lau since she lost her mother to leukemia two years ago. Just as her grandmother was thought to be a connection to the underworld for the living, Lau views her work as a threshold to another realm while being fully engaged in the current moment. On the heels of closing her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and looking forward to her presentation at the Macau Pavilion in the upcoming Venice Biennale, Lau talked to ArtAsiaPacific about the convergence of generations in her work.
