When I arrived at the address in Brooklyn, I was surprised at the sheer size of the building—an old industrial warehouse that occupied an entire city block, with patched-over windows and a foreboding brick exterior. Heidi Lau met me at the door and led me up a set of metal stairs and down a seemingly endless hallway, where distant sounds of art making could faintly be heard. Her studio was a lot like her: small, bright, unassuming, full of little surprises. Her sculptures seemed to listen as we talked about them, as if they might worm their way out the door the minute we weren’t paying attention.
Tell me about your work.
So as you can see, this is like my cave. I got my own kiln maybe four years ago, and before that I was sharing in a communal ceramics studio, and it was harder to make larger work, if you can imagine—because usually a lot of pottery studios are good for making fifty bowls, but no so good for making sculptural work. But I got the Joan Mitchel Foundation grant and that’s when I decided I needed to take it to the next step. So, this has been where I make everything for four years. Everything is hand-built here, and I don’t actually use that many tools, other than this little awl. Everything is basically made by my hands. I guess I can talk about these two things I got back from MAD [Museum of Art and Design], the Burke Prize show.
I love the MAD Museum, they’re like my favorite museum, because nobody knows it’s there.
They always have really interesting work. It’s kind of crazy, they started doing this thing called the Burke Prize, which is a $50,000 grant for anyone that works in ceramics or craft-related, so the Burke Prize exhibition is the 16 finalists, so I was one of the finalists, and these two pieces were showcased. I guess a lot of my work is inspired in many ways from growing up in Macau, where I’m from, my family was and still is very Taoist, and very superstitious. I always remember the first memory of going to a temple with my grandma and her telling me, ‘This gatekeeper of hell is your great grandfather.’ I guess she was really sick as a kid, and then her parents did this Taoist ritual on her so that the gatekeeper would keep her out—that story really stuck with me in many ways, it’s this strange familial connection to the underworld, or just things you cannot see. I guess this arched piece is sort of based on imagining my grandma going through an arch-like doorway into the underworld, but also returning from the dead as well. I was reading a lot of Taoist literature on the descriptions of hell, because there’s actually eighteen levels, so it’s dependent on what sin you have committed, you’ll be thrown into a different level.
Now is it a similar concept to Judeo-Christian hell, like it’s a place strictly for punishment, or is it hell as in just the afterlife?
It’s just the afterlife. There’s no heaven, it’s just the afterlife. And you can leave, you have a choice to leave. Actually I did a piece in the Socrates Sculpture Park a few years ago, I made this grotto based on this idea where at the end of hell there’s a bridge and an old lady who serves you a bowl of soup to erase your memory, so that when you pass on, you don’t remember. But there are a lot of spirits that get stuck there, because there are things they don’t want to give up, so they would rather be in hell forever, and it’s kind of like their bodies start merging with their environment. So that enters a lot of my work, it’s like anthropomorphized environment—people have turned into their environment because they have been there for so long because they couldn’t get out or didn’t want to get out.
So where does the bridge go?
That’s so you can be reincarnated.
Ohhh. So the spirits that choose to stay, they don’t want to forget their life.
Yeah, so they would rather be in hell forever.