YAM LAU, "Room," Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, BC, April 2 - June 4, 2011

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"Room: An Extension"

Yam Lau, "Room: An Extension," video still. Courtesy of the artist.

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"Room: An Extension"

Yam Lau, "Room: An Extension," video still. Courtesy of the artist.

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"Room: An Extension"

Yam Lau, "Room: An Extension," video still. Courtesy of the artist.

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YAM LAU: "Room"

Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, BC,

April 2 - June 4, 2011

By Rachel Rosenfield Lafo

Toronto-based artist Yam Lau creates hybrid worlds that blend real and digitally generated space in intersecting and overlapping layers of great spatial and metaphysical complexity. Two of his recent works were included in Surrey Art Gallery’s Dwelling, three, thematically-related exhibitions that focused on house and home. Presented as part of the gallery’s TechLab digital art exhibition program, Lau’s two computer-generated animations and digital videos occupied their own room - one shown on a monitor inside the darkened space and the other on a monitor just outside. Thus, the actual gallery room became the container for the rooms depicted in Lau’s videos, effectively echoing the “room within a room” structure used by the artist.

Lau challenges the traditional notion of the home as a place of refuge and privacy by portraying the rooms in his videos as transparent vessels through which intimate activities are observed. In the 2007 work, Room: an extension, the open framework of a room revolves in a large, empty space, like a model on display in a home show. Its walls appear to be made of translucent fabric through which the artist is seen going about the routines of daily life – rising from bed, opening the shades, getting dressed. Within this complex network of layers of real-time video and computer animation, images repeat, the room revolves, and as the artist walks through a door, another room swivels out from the first one, and we, along with the artist, enter the living room where more activities are performed. In this waking dream where time and space collapse, we are voyeurs, looking in from the outside.

While there is no soundtrack in Room: an extension, Lau’s recent video, Rehearsal, 2010, opens with the evocative sound of rain and a view through a geometric screen into a room with a table. As our eyes progress through this digitally constructed animation proceeding virtually through the space the way we might navigate the different levels of a video game, we see the shadows of falling rain, as well as trees, and branches flickering on the sheer walls of the room. At the same time, smaller digital images of the structural elements of a room, like architectural drawings, spin in space. Then, as thunder cracks and lightening flashes, we close in on the window of yet another room, through which we see a video of an actual space, where a woman, smoking a cigarette, sits with her back to us, her image reflected in a mirror on the opposite wall. Like an audience in a cinema, we watch, entranced by an aura of mystery and suspense, lulled by the sound of the rain as the woman wipes tears from her eyes. Just as she stands and turns towards us, frustratingly, the room dissolves back into computer-generated space. At the same time that Lau merges and confuses real and virtual space and time, he thwarts our narrative reading of the video. His female character is reminiscent of the solitary woman in a Vermeer painting, or the protagonist in a film noir, whose thoughts and motivations we can only imagine, but never really know.

Through these video montages of spatial representations and technological strategies, Lau poetically represents his vision of a world where solidity dissolves, images shift and memories surface, disappear and evolve, persuasively achieving his stated goal “to subtract weight from the world.”