Double End Lobster Claw
Hiu Tung LAU
20 Nov 2024 - 8 Jan 2025
Hiu Tung Lau’s visual language seems, as it were, modernist or even classic compared to her contemporaries, featuring simple compositions, refined visual textures and abounding narratives. Particularly impressive is the captivating use of grey in her works—she favours large grey areas with distinct colour nuances as backgrounds, serving as the mise en scène for figures or objects. There are at least two discernible themes in her practice: one is her attempt to seek equilibrium between past artistic traditions with contemporary visual demands, including the balance between the rational and the sensual, in the composition of her paintings; the other is her exploration of how abstract visual language can convey trauma and the embodied experience it leads to.
Many of Hiu Tung’s works reveal clues for interpretation through personal narratives. Her new series continues to delve into the bodily experience of trauma and healing. While there is typically a natural separation between the artist and their work, Hiu Tung seeks to blur this boundary, looking upon her works as spatial extensions of self-reflection, confronting her physical pain directly. Works in her new series are generally small, around 30×40 centimetres. Hiu Tung has mentioned her preference for small-scale works, as they allow for closer, more intimate interaction with the viewer, resembling a face-to-face conversation and avoiding the physical confrontation often felt with larger pieces.
If all the works in the series were lined up along a wall, looking at these abstract depictions of objects would feel like viewing a series of portraits, whose colours resemble human skin tones, with underlying emotions that verge on breaking through. Boys don’t cry (only in shade), for example, seems to depict a repetitive forced motion of putting on and removing glasses, evoking an imagination of the hidden tears behind the eyes. Similarly, small-scale pieces like Horizon cut to the heart, The burning and Knife share the artist’s favourite deep red backgrounds, suggesting a state of hurt and unease. In Horizon cut to the heart, the viewer’s gaze follows the road stretching into the distance, while the foreground touches upon a heartbroken moment, with a white square in the lower right disrupts the spatial tension, restraining the spread of red and leaving leeway within the frame. Building a cage to hold me is the only small-scale work with self-portrait elements, in which the artist emphasises a background of unease while inviting infinitive interpretation with an indistinct figure of the subject.
Although the artist does not directly use her body as a medium, physicality is a substantial aspect of her work. Aside from her role as an artist, Hiu Tung is also a triathlete, and fitness has had a positive impact on her art and life. In her 2022 solo project, I am in training, don’t kiss me, she used a series of sculptures, installations, and paintings to satirise the almost religious obsession with fitness and the contradictory attitudes toward health, probing further into the conflicts of dichotomy in biological gender. As a novice art historian, I am easily drawn to the art historical references in her work; for instance, I am in training, don’t kiss me cleverly referenced the title of a 1927 work by French artist Claude Cahun, exploring themes of gender and bodily autonomy. She acknowledges that fitness has changed her mental state and attitude toward things, and these transformations subtly permeate her art practice, as seen in Back and forth, which features lighter symbols and a brighter background. Hiu Tung’s works have a distinct character: as she put it, painting is a form of meditative practice, and through delicate brushwork and a melancholic modernist temperament, viewers can have a glimpse of the artist’s sensitive inner world.