Alan Lau July 26, 2012

Alan Lau draws on his day job as a produce worker at Uwajimaya for some of the inspiration for his paintings. In a statement for the show he writes: "The hours spent sorting texture, color, beauty and decay in preparation for display gives your mind time to wander. Yet most of the time we spend on this earth is given to the process of work and that can't help but effect everything else we do." While attention to the elegance and complexity of the natural world underlies much of Lau's work, music and Western and Eastern visual arts traditions also play a role. His work is both thematically and formally rich. Using a mixture of media including sumi ink, oil pastel, and China markers Lau lays down a network of marks that eventually click into compositional place. This process produces paintings with transparent surfaces of varying density held together by a subtle but clear formal structure.