Heidi Lau: Apparition

Promoter: The Macao Museum of Art

Heidi Lau (Macao) currently lives and works in New York. Her practice engages in the making of minor history, the recreation of that which has been lost to time and man. Her ceramic work is modeled after tokens of remembrance—ritual objects, funerary monuments, and fossilized creatures—which are infested, deconstructed, and rebuilt by hand. Reconfiguring fragmented personal and collective memories, she makes collections of symbolic artifacts and zoomorphic ruins as materialisation of the archaic and the invisible. In the process, she reenacts the non-linearity and materiality of the past, molding a tactile connection to the disappearing, impossible identity of home: Taoist mythology, folk superstitions, and Macau’s colonial history provide essential source material for her exploration of transcendental homelessness, displacement, and nostalgia as the condition of contemporary existence.