Yam Lau: The Present Re-Turns

Yam Lau is a Hong Kong born visual artist and writer whose work uses computer animation, video, and painting to explore space, image, and time. Lau is currently an associate professor at York University in Toronto.

When I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming too.
– Chuang Tzu

There is a painting done by Edouard Manet of his friend Claude Monet and his wife, as they float about in their boat/studio on a lake. Monet is pictured at his easel on this drifting studio: a portrait of a painter in pursuit of reality, an artist hoping to anchor some sort of appearance to surface by way of his magical touch, an artist living the art of serenity, having created a pocket of repose with his garden habitat.

Monet painted this landscape as it came to him, as it approached and surrounded him while he turned about on the sensuous surface of a water body, with its reflections and ripples. For him, it was always the sky with its clouds, the clouds with their sky reflected, adrift with lily pads: things and their images reflected in their intermingling. Adrift, as Agnes Martin said  (borrowing from Chuang Tzu), “free and easy wandering.” This is also a nice image of the slowness proposed by film artist Trinh t. Minh-ha who wrote, “slowness as a strategy of resistance is much needed in the speed of urban routine life.”

Experiencing an installation by Toronto artist Yam Lau is to be similarly adrift in a floating studio, gliding, slowly touring, following the unfolding flows of an evanescent imagery that appears in its very disappearing. Such movements, these comings and goings, have their parallel in Lau’s everyday life. When Lau left his home in Hong Kong as an adolescent on his own, he was perhaps following the advice of Chuang Tzu, the 4th century BC poet, who wrote: “leap into the boundless and make it your home.” Although it’s not easy to think of his first Canadian home, Edmonton, Alberta, as “the boundless”, we can try.

For the past fifteen years, this is what Lau has been working on through his pursuit of digital video animation and installations that adopt architecture, daily life and even autobiographical passages as supports. Lau moves through these as if on a tour, even as we realize that the field of digital animation is in fact a “detour” in which the camera is a fiction, and that there is nothing, no “already there” being recorded, the image on screen is always in the making, partially present and partially absent.

This is quite a serious diversion from the reality given in analogue media. In the digital paradigm, algorithms do the work, not our hands or eyes. The image only rarely assumes the movement of a human body. However, now existing perpetually in process, the image is irreducibly bound up with the body, a new “intimacy”.

It’s amusing that the notion of a tour is connected to that of a turn if we consider their meaning in French, where un tour is a turn. “Return” (retour) is one of the characteristics of Lau’s video, as is the strategy of the de-tour, which is a matter of pluralizing the viewer, allowing the animation to be simultaneously fiction, documentary or home video.

These are the concerns Lau has been pursuing in recent years, deploying tactics that often belong to the field of play such as diversion, distraction, wandering and detouring, all of which he has submitted to the processes of digital media. And yet finally, it seems that Lau is not actually using the digital media as an instrument or apparatus, but in fact presents an ontology of the virtual image by way of a phenomenology of the animated digital video experience.

Yam Lau, Hutong House, 2009, still image computer-generated animation digital video. Right: Rehearsal, 2010, computer-generated animation, digital video. Below left: Hutong House, 2009, still image computer-generated animation digital video. Below right: Rehearsal, 2010, computer-generated animation digital video installation at Axeneo 7 in 2014. Opposite: room an extension, 2008, computer-generated animation digital video installation at Musée d’art de joliette in 2010.

Earlier pieces include Scapeland 11, 2007, Room: An Extension, 2008, Hutong House, 2009, and the three more recent works to be discussed here; Rehearsal, 2010, Between Past and Present: Lived Moments in Beijing, 2012, and the wonderfully resonant Nüshu: Echo Chambers, 2014.

Rehearsal, a video animation, opens into a room of models floating in layers of varying opacity. The point of view or “camera” position is itself a creation of the digital CGI software Lau has adopted to perform this artwork. In this case, “the camera” tours through layers of variable density as they dissolve and rotate. If there are images, they are schematic depictions of rooms in the style of architectural renderings. Equally prominent is the audio element, the sound of rain falling vigorously. The camera wheels through the unfolding spaces that refold while the camera pans left, turning around multiple and changing pivot points.

If this is a room, an interior we are in, there are shadows cast on its walls by the schematic framings of the other rooms wheeling around in “the space.” Perhaps at this point what has become most obvious is the consistency of the speed; it feels invariable, like a drone. The audio, on the other hand, gestures toward something natural or epi-sodic, a storm with rain, thunder and lightning.

Meanwhile, imagery shot with an actual camera slips into the frame, a sequence through a window into a room interior where a woman sits quietly smoking, inwardly absorbed in a private moment while the rain falls in the surrounding space. She is reflect-ed to us in a mirror on the wall opposite the window. The camera withdraws back out through layers, leaving her in this introspective moment, possibly wiping tears from her eyes, an interior echo of the rain falling “outside.” These elements all take place as screens, veils, mirrors, partitions, walls and windows participate in a climate of uncertainty, or even anxiety.

As a former painter, Lau is preoccupied with the screen as a motif. In the history of Chinese painting traditions, the screen, according to art historian Wu Hung, is the single most important item. Lau’s ways of presenting the screen are multiple: a screen can be an object in a room, or nearly transparent itself; a screen may be operating as a veil or a window, or even as a mirror. In this sense, alongside Wu Hung’s observations on the role of screens in art, there are interest-ing western examples of transparency and reflection in architecture such as the Mies van der Rohe pavilion in Barcelona, or the fabulous Centre Cartier in Paris, built by Jean Nouvel.

Between Past and Present: Lived Moments in Beijing opens with a close-up shot of a candle burning, inserted and superimposed on a rotating and multiplying ensemble of screens and images of screens. Simultaneously, we hear traditional wind chimes. These screens have been drawn, are being drawn, erased and refilled according to the technique of the televisual apparatus. Semi-transparent, these screens both reveal and obscure the view of a person seated at a table. Meanwhile the camera is panning, wheeling in a long arc, as a shadow image obviously replicated from the person at the table is displaced close to the physical frame and surface of the projection wall—what I think of as the actual wall of the room I am in. The architecture of this room is being drawn with computer-assisted design software (drawn algorithmically) with no hands, no eyes, no linear narrative of mortality; weightless.

As in Rehearsal, the camera tours and re-turns amongst the screens, lattices and veils with constant variations of transparency and opacity, all occurring with the same feeling of “robotic” or auto-mated speed, a feeling that is perhaps familiar, seen in Kubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, or in the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni with its persistent mapping and framing of interior architectures, exploring in slow motion an architectural everyday. It’s a feeling that something is being suspended, held up even while ongoing.

The person at the desk, (who could be the artist) in Between Past and Present is on a platform that floats on dark waters. Behind him, one wall is formed by a traditional “moon gate” or portal to “the outside.” Through the semi-transparency of the scene we can also see a night sky with stars and a quarter moon, though their artificiality is exaggerated, leaving us not with the real thing but with its apparition or ghostly double. Meanwhile, the chimes and the sounds of running water continue. The camera pans, the zoom deepens and all the aspects are rendered as apparition, echoing and interwoven.

After several minutes of slow motion in this long pan and zoom of the camera, an entirely new event emerges of a street scene in conventional, real-time camera footage. Even so, this footage has been composited within the program of the design software, erasing any possible sense of a hierarchy as to which is more “real.” The street scene is likely one in China, a busy urban site with buses passing and shoppers rushing here and there, quite in contrast to the refined slowness of this film experience.

Alongside the street scenes are street sounds, with the faintly detectable sound of wind chimes. As the camera zooms into the street scene and that scene prevails, the sounds intermingle. The street scene in its filmic mode of realism is momentarily dominant. However, after a pause, the camera leaves the street scene through an increasing layering of transparencies until we are back to the always multiplying and dissolving screens and images of screens, to the moon gate, to the walls of the studio, and back to the designer’s table with its candle, starry night and wind chimes. The scene returns again to the street documentary, first by way of vignettes, then a full screen and zoom to the street—perhaps Beijing—this time fully in night’s darkness. And then, back to the studio, starry night, chimes and softly running water. Tranquillity, we might suppose.

With the title of this 2012 video animation, Between Past and Present: Lived Moments in Beijing, Yam Lau announces his interest in what artist Pierre Huyghe calls “connectivities.” These are the ways one inhabits the transitional space between then and now, here and there. Or the paradox of bridging that takes place “in between” but without attachment to fixed points, avoiding any anchoring to the relative permanence of solid shores.

The interspersing of live camera documentary in Lived Moments is an example of how in some accounts, memory works as an anchor by securing us to a perpetually past reality. In Lau’s case, such a past becomes an imagined or uncertain past, hence provisional and transitional, a past in a present that is as mobile as it is fixed, as absent as present.

But there is little new thought in this. What is of real interest and import is the value for life that we can find mapped out in Lau’s work in general. That is his bridging of east and west, of past and present, of carrying over practices for life that have emerged and endured over centuries. Lau integrates the momentous changes in the west through post-mechanical, post-historical, electronic technology with longstanding traditions from Asia. It seems possible that Lau’s work contributes to a vision that may take us beyond the current dystopic turn of technological culture toward the phronesis proposed by Aristotle, that most western of mystics.

Nüshu: Echo Chambers, 2014, Lau’s newest animation, following recent researches in China, is initially just an ellipse of lighting on a floor invisible in darkness. Through a gradual expansion of lighting, a space emerges, paradoxically closed, as if made from stone without openings and yet appearing simply by way of light and lighting. As the room slowly fills with light, it simultaneously fills with the voice of a woman chanting a song. In this “echo chamber” the song resonates with a return of the past: this is the voice of an elder. Again, as the room is shaped by lighting, it is occupied and shaped by shadows of calligraphic script that float across the walls. This script, if we pursue its story, is a syllabic script, a lost language created and used exclusively by women in Jiangyong Prefecture. Forbidden formal education for many centuries, the village women developed the Nüshu script in order to communicate with one another. They embroidered the script into cloth and wrote it in books and on paper fans. Sung in Nüshu, the song Lau has recorded presents again his concerns with a disappeared local history in the context of our global cultures’ intense de-localization.

New York based artist and writer David Court has written with great sensitivity on Lau’s practice. What Court finds most pertinent is Lau’s “calling up…thoughts of play, relaxation and the activity of refreshing oneself.” Court appreciates what he calls the conviviality of Lau’s work, and this seems to identify what must be an important contribution of resistance to the current environment of contemporary art, competitive and consumerist as it is. He has observed that Lau proposes “a space of quietness, slowness and intimacy,” and that these qualities are only seemingly at odds with the aesthetic of digital culture. Perhaps in this he is thinking of the “Hollywood” culture of special effects, and the visual violence and noise of video games.

To experience a Yam Lau film is to undergo something that loops the time of its own making, simultaneously an enactment and re-enactment of its own building process. We are immediately caught up in a space that is less concerned with movement or motion than with being in time. That is, neither fully present nor fully absent. Curiously, on paper “in time” looks like the French intime, which as a noun means intimate and as a verb means “to hint”. With this, Lau performs a most unique and valuable intertwining of an “eastern” practice of non-attachment and a loosening of “western” technology.

Stephen Horne lives in France and Montreal and writes on contemporary art in Canada and abroad.

This article is published in issue 33.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue