Gallery EXIT is pleased to present In The Offing, the first solo exhibition of Lewis LAU Yin To with the gallery.
“In The Offing” refers to the area where the sea touches the sky, the fine line where movement becomes stillness. Distant while at the same time visible, paintings by Lewis Lau revolve around the visual and experiential implications that the line of horizon imposes on our understanding of scenery. While using the photographic image as a point of departure, the featured works move away from their time bounded dimension and explore the possibility of portraying a timeless exposure of memory – the point where Sight and its objective dimension meets Absence and the imaginative power it brings. All the unnecessary signs, unseemly for the remembrance of an event, are in the works deleted from the original image and rendered into new and every time richer manifestations. Seemingly staged in every detail, the works in fact explore memory by means of brushstrokes. A gesture unrestrained from any mental or physical boundary, it enables the artist’s interventions to explore fortuitous and unforeseen trajectories.
Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida notes that “Ultimately – or at the limit – in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight’, Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” The works by Lewis Lau quietly position themselves in the offing, where experience interjects with the memory of it.
Lewis Lau obtained a Master in Fine Arts from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the recipient of the Ting Yen Yung Creative Awards, 2009 and Y.S. Hui Fine Arts Award, 2010.
