Lau Yat Wai
ENG
<Mute Tumult of Memories>, 2025
Stoneware, video, coiling, molding, slab building, wheel throwing, 1230℃, 150 x 100 x 160cm.
Lau Yat Wai's work, through the two mediums of video and ceramics, explores how memory is retained, blurred, and reconstructed. In the video work, he records unfired clay sculptures submerged in water, slowly dissolving and collapsing; in the ceramic work, he reproduces everyday objects with a precision that makes them nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, then covers their surface with a thick lava glaze. These two different approaches are connected in that both reveal the nature of memory through the very process of the material's transformation.
The dissolving clay and the glaze that covers the surface each speak of memory in their own way. One shows memory that disappears and comes apart; the other shows memory that is ceaselessly rewritten as new experiences layer over it. The video and the ceramic work illuminate each other, revealing the tension between the wish to hold on to form and a memory that, in the end, cannot help but change.
