Yam Lau: A House Divided, and United Again

In contemporary terms, the image is ambiguous; it can be a surface that not only captures or mirrors, but also refracts and modulates. Working with digital animation and three-dimensional modelling software, Toronto-based artist Yam Lau constructs virtual spaces that express the complexity of simply being in the world, posing an alternative to the deployment of these hybrid technologies solely for the production of commodities or special effects.

“Hutong House,” a recent exhibit at Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto that’s soon showing at the Yuanfen New Media Art Space in Beijing, presents a three-dimensional animation documenting an afternoon spent in a traditional Chinese courtyard house—a form of dwelling that has been disappearing through the rapid processes of urban development.

In Lau’s animation, this historical architecture appears as a model within a stage-like space. The walls of the model are composed of translucent, two-dimensional video-images of each wall of the house, arranged to reproduce, in a schematic fashion, the space that they represent. This nesting of one kind of image within another—the invented, three-dimensional space of the model and the recorded, two-dimensional space of the video—produces a complex, fluctuating space; a hybrid space bringing together different modes of imaging.

Viewing—or, better, encountering—the work Hutong 3, you are positioned in a space apart from the house as it continuously rotates, alternating between interior and exterior views. In this movement, there is a rhythm of proximity and separation, of being inside and outside. The work begins with a stunning and paradoxical image of this passage. A reflection appears in the glass of an exterior door: a figure, Yam Lau, approaches and enters the doorway from within the doorway. As he passes through the doorway another space appears and folds out, an interior emerging from an exterior. Figures do not inhabit or move through this space as expected. They circulate on the periphery, multiplied or viewed from several perspectives.

If this work can be considered to be something like a documentary, it is one that insists on the present-ness of the past. As a reconstruction or reimagining, it not only describes a space, but also the process of its own making—the activities of planning and producing the work. We see Lau activating a camera, waiting around as the camera records and discussing with his friend the possibilities for the work. In this way, the work documents the time of its production, reorganizing it into something more like the time of memory or imagination: a non-linear aggregation of moments.

Employing a logic that is simultaneously poetic and diagrammatic, “Hutong House” presents a virtual world of multiple and paradoxical views. In this imagining of a house, Yam Lau constructs a prismatic image that (almost incidentally) reflects the contemporary complexity of the world of images. Encountering this ephemeral image of a precarious architecture is not so much a matter of making-sense as simply sensing. (Seven Stars E St, Beijing CN)