Heidi Lau at Green-Wood Cemetery
The catacombs of this city cemetery are above floor, tunneled right into a hillside within the 1850s, maybe to allay Victoran-era fears of being buried alive. It’s on this clammy house assuring everlasting relaxation that Heidi Lau has embedded a sculpture backyard that nimbly bridges the terrestrial and the celestial. Her craggy, porous ceramics are hand constructed with archaic aptitude, as if hewn by wind and water. They recall spirit stones or scholar’s rocks: bones of the earth endowed with primordial energies. A few of Lau’s works attain for the mausoleum’s skylights; others solid moody penumbrae as they dangle from the ceiling through chains, suspended in gothic limbo. Like fossils they insist that, certainly, nothing is everlasting.
The astounding intricacy and quantity of those works—many cloistered inside a dozen or so dynastic vaults—mirror Lau’s yearlong residency at Inexperienced-Wooden. Maybe by no means earlier than within the cemetery’s 184 years has it been so thrillingly haunted, and by East Asian apparitions: Lau, drawing on Taoist mythologies, conjures vestiges of spirits with endurance. Exquisitely creepy vertebrae path from her ceramics’ petrified surfaces. Vacant faces materialize, camouflaged by glazes that adeptly meld the qualities of oxidized steel and tar. Extra conspicuous are the elfin palms that scrabble throughout this alien patina, as if in gradual self-creation. Surrounded by the useless, this animism goes past ancestral tribute. Lau frames the tomb as a transitional house, maybe to remind us of the slippery boundary between personhood and objecthood.
Accompanying textual content notes that roaming Inexperienced-Wooden evoked for Lau recollections of her late grandfather’s backyard in Macau, and that Chinese language gardens are “a metaphor for time, house, and our place within the cosmos.” These distant landscapes translate, improbably, to the catacombs’ spartan inside. We cycle by way of vaults to go to Lau’s creations, all the time returning to a central hall: a stream that generates introspection and a stunning sense of play. That these sculptures, together with the sheer novelty of exploring sometimes locked burial chambers, don’t compete for our consideration is a mark of the artist’s attunement to the potencies of objects and to websites of remembrance. By the exhibition’s early days, spiders, too, had come, discovering equilibrium within the pits of recent shrines.
— Claire Voon
