Multi-hyphenate creative Dorothy Lau is an art director and founder of #GTDLcreative by trade, a drummer and songwriter for fun and has a background in fine art. She sees herself, first and foremost, as a contemporary artist, working with digitally manipulated media and installation to explore “the natural compulsion for social acceptance and personal excellence,” she says, “with reference to psychoanalysis theories.”
Adopting an autobiographical approach, her artworks often feature self-portraits that grapple with an internal dialogue about the perplexity of her social identity, which is an amalgamation of her Hong Kong heritage and Australian education. They detail her desire to succeed in the art world and her own “paralysing fear of mediocrity.”
Lau’s work was recently exhibited in a group show called REDUX at 1a Space at the Cattle Depot Artist Village in Ma Tau Kok, which was open three days before closing and moving online because of COVID-19 restrictions. “It’s quite meta,” she explains, because “the show was meant to reflect on artists creating and adapting to the [pandemic] situation when most human interactions are suspended. But it ended up digital, which is almost a further exploration of the subject.”
One of the artworks she exhibited was called A Stagnant Stack (2020), which displayed three digitally manipulated images of herself wearing grey pantsuits, layered on top of one another. The work explores the idea of “sustaining ambition and motivation at a time when most industries are stagnant at best,” she explains. It will be shown again at ‘Disobedient Daughters’, an upcoming exhibition curated by Sophia Cai at Counihan Gallery in Australia that examines stereotypical images of Asian women in a global context.
The piece is informed by the magazine columns and newspaper think pieces that have proliferated during the pandemic period, encouraging introspection and personal growth. It’s informed by The Sisyphus Complex, which describes the need to excel at a task even when it is endless and futile. It gets its name from a character in Greek mythology who was punished by being forced to continuously roll a boulder up a steep hill.
As an art director, Lau has worked in the past with recording artists Hins Cheung, Gigi Leung, Edmund Leung, and Fiona Sit on their music videos. She’s also created large installations with layers of fabrics and other materials for Jocelyn Chan’s “Angel Sanctuary” MV and Vincy Chan’s “Wild Magnolia” MV, for which she created a dress that merged with the set that Vincy had to escape from.
“Other traits of my set designs are heavily decorated rooms filled with paper and antique furniture, and quirky items I collect from thrift shops all over Hong Kong,” she adds. There’s a second-hand warehouse shop in Tuen Mun and Sham Shui Po, where she knows the owners. It’s helped her rediscover Hong Kong, and it’s complex history a little better.
Lau is still on the edge of the art scene in Hong Kong, a city she only returned to a couple of years ago, but from the outside she sees a separation. “Hong Kong is one of the largest markets in the world and most of the art galleries are in Central, but not many of the artists represented are from Hong Kong,” she explains. “Then, on the flip side, there are small galleries and the work is more raw, less refined but no less interesting.” She seems to fit somewhere between the two — her work is impeccable and carefully considered, but she’s still an emerging artist who needs the space in which to hone her craft.
Editor
Emma RussellCredit
Lead Image: Jake S. Thomas
