Alan Lau draws on his day job as a produce worker at
Uwajimaya for some of the inspiration for his paintings. In a statement
for the show he writes: "The hours spent sorting texture, color, beauty
and decay in preparation for display gives your mind time to wander. Yet
most of the time we spend on this earth is given to the process of work
and that can't help but effect everything else we do." While attention to
the elegance and complexity of the natural world underlies much of Lau's
work, music and Western and Eastern visual arts traditions also play a
role. His work is both thematically and formally rich. Using a mixture
of media including sumi ink, oil pastel, and China markers Lau lays down a
network of marks that eventually click into compositional place. This
process produces paintings with transparent surfaces of varying density
held together by a subtle but clear formal structure. The show will
include work in both black and white and color and in a variety of sizes
ranging from 12 x 8" to 55" square. Lau's last solo show at the Seders
Gallery was in 2001. Since that time his work has been included in The
Drawn Image at Evergreen State College (2002), Variations of Abstraction:
Selections from the City of Seattle's Portable Collection at City Space
(2003), Eric Ansel, Bruce Campbell, Alan Lau, Ted Murphy at the Hopkins
Center at Dartmouth College (2004), and Past Present at the Archer Gallery
at Clark College in Vancouver WA (2005).
