ALAN LAU
Born in 1948 in Oroville, CA Alan studied in Japan at the Nanga School in Kyoto and the University of California in Santa Cruz. He came to Seattle in the late 1970's and has exhibited regularly in solo and group shows in the area. Also a poet, he has had several works published. His paintings, sumi on paper, are also very poetic, predominantly black and white. Water, sky, rocks are often suggested.




"I traveled east
but I kept turning back

took a few steps
and then looked west again

would Chengdu be in ruins now
after the uprising?

was my thatched cottage still intact
beside the Flower-Washing Streams?" 

- an excerpt from "Song of My Friendship With Vice
Prefect Yan by Du Fu from "Du Fu - A Life in Poetry" 
(Knopf) translated by David Young

 

I Came To The Ruins - Alan Lau 

We are standing in the shell of a crumbling house, our whole family posed behind a solitary fragment of a tall chair. Here in Southern China where the greenery and heat reminds a friend of Hawai'i.  I think of our fascination with ruins as we stand on a foundation my father and his brother grew up in, a place we never expected to find.  All over China from Beijing to Shanghai to Chengdu we had one cousin along with us who was still fluent in our native dialect of Hakka.  For some reason when he spoke to other Hakka in cities, they had trouble understanding him. It wasn't till our van bumped along the back roads of rural Canton province did the villagers begin to understand him, pointing this way and that until we just stumbled upon this shell of our ancestor's house. 

What is it about ruins that hold such sway over our imagination?  Whether we make pilgrimages to Macchu Picchu or Angkor Wat or just end up building our new edifices over the previous dweller's ruins until they become newer ruins. What can we hope to find?  Is it something as basic as shelter or confirmation that civilization had preceded us before on this journey? 

I think of the ancient Phoenix Hall of Byodo-in in Kyoto built in 1053. Fire, war, neglect had taken its' toll on this grand structure near the Uji Bridge. Perhaps drifters and the homeless had built small fires within its' dark walls to stay warm from the bitter cold drifting past a field overgrown with weeds? How the "Hall of Equality" survived over a thousand years of neglect to become a resurrected architectural relic of Kyoto's glorious eleventh century now drawing thousands of visitors today is a wonder. 

As we stand in ruins of our own making, have we completed the circle or are we destined to continue the journey with no guarantee of ever returning home. From time to time I think of that photo of a family posed in front of a crumbling house staring off into the distance and wonder who they are and where they are going.

 

"Who would dare to say that what we have
destroyed was worth a hundred times more than
what we had dreamt and ceaselessly transfigured in
murmuring to the ruins? - Rene Char

from "The Brittle Age And Returning Upland" (New Directions) as
translated by Gustaf Sobin










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