Tuesday TaLKS: Heidi Lau

In place of our 2020 fall exhibitions, Mazmanian Gallery presented a series of remote lectures by artists and designers speaking about their work and creative practices. This is a recording of the Tuesday Talk with Heidi Lau on Nov 17, 2020.

Heidi Lau grew up in Macao, and currently lives and works in New York. Her practice engages in the making of minor history, the recreation of that which has been lost to time and man. Her ceramic work is modeled after tokens of remembrance—ritual objects, funerary monuments, and fossilized creatures—which are infested, deconstructed, and rebuilt by hand. Reconfiguring fragmented personal and collective memories, she makes collections of symbolic artifacts and zoomorphic ruins as materialization of the archaic and the invisible. In the process, she reenacts the non-linearity and materiality of the past, molding a tactile connection to the disappearing, impossible identity of home: Taoist mythology, folk superstitions, and Macau’s colonial history provide essential source material for her exploration of transcendental homelessness, displacement, and nostalgia as the condition of contemporary existence.