Alan Lau, “Walk Along the Kamogawa”

by Matthew Kangas

ArtXContemporary, Seattle, Washington

Continuing through November 15, 2025

Alan Lau, “in the peach orchard,” 2001, Sumi ink, watercolor and pastel on rice paper, 53 3/4 x 54”. All images courtesy of ArtXContemporary, Seattle.

Alan Lau’s current exhibit is both straightforward and complicated. His variously scaled Sumi paintings are based on reminiscences of and experiences in Kyoto, where he spends part of each year in the family home of his wife, art critic Kazuo Nakane. The dozen works on paper are straightforward, impressively beautiful in their variations and their implementation of the Sumi-ink technique, which Lau studied in Japan with Nirakushi Toriumi in 1972-74.

Before we consider the artworks, though, it is necessary to mention the complicated part: Lau’s overwhelming wraparound of words attached to the otherwise completely independent imagery. Not only is there a book accompanying the exhibit that includes the artist’s poetry, there is a long artist’s statement in the form of a memoir, and an extensive essay by Claire Cuccio. Not content to describe Lau’s techniques — “freehand drips, marks and washes” — Cuccio extrapolates on the artist’s love of jazz and British pop music, his affinity to Chinese calligraphy, his consciousness of the slowly evaporating character of Old Kyoto, and even a detailed lineage linking Lau to an 18th-century Japanese musician, poet, painter, and calligrapher. Such an august pedigree is all very well and good, but it comes across as overkill, or over-determination, on the part of the artist and his mini-biographer to control the narrative and interpretation of his art. (His part-time job at a fruit and vegetable stand is also invoked with a straight face.)

Alan Lau, “that day by the sea,” 2004, Sumi ink, watercolor and pastel on rice paper, 53 x 53 3/4”.

At 76, Lau is unquestionably an innovator with the Sumi technique. He brings more color, more gestures, more imagery to the tradition. His current work offers an illuminating glimpse into his overall accomplishment. It also raises several issues about the direction and overall character of his encounters with the historic medium. For example, with frequent allusions to the Northwest School and those artists’ affinities to Asian art, Lau has channeled the intimate scale of Mark Tobey’s prints and paintings in his seven tiny diptychs, the ”Shimogamo” series. “Typhoon Waters,” “Mountains I Can’t Quite See,” and “Moist Ground” are mostly darkened scenes of nature that transcend Tobey’s tendency toward abstraction. Lau himself struggles with abstraction to the extent that he retains explicit allusions to nature. “Small Changes,” however, with its blend of pastel, Sumi ink and pencil, veers closer to complete abstraction and is the stronger for it. Less dense and clotted, areas of the composition are allowed to breathe, enlivening the all-over image and lifting it above the mountain tops or forest floors of the others.

Alan Lau, “green impression — a walk in the garden,” 2019, Sumi, watercolor and pastel on rice paper, 53 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 2”.

Lau’s use of color is another area of advance from traditionally black ink Sumi painting. “That day by the sea” (2004) is an early work with plenty of open air that is scattered and spattered with yellow, pink, blue and green dots. Its size — approximately five feet square — allows the artist a physicality of gesture akin to Pollock that is suppressed in the other paintings, most of which date from 2018 or 2019. Among the largest works, also measuring between four and five feet, churning passages better release energies that have characterized the best of Lau’s paintings in the past. “Heaven” (2018) has an ascending composition of fog and plant stems, but may be just as easily regarded as purely abstract. “In the peach orchard” (2001) is highlighted by a vivid distribution of black-and-white spots with pale green, pinks and yellows. Lau shrewdly keeps this and other compositions in motion.

The strongest works are “green impression” (2019) and “living in this city where you can never fine me” (2018). Each offers varied treatments of black inks joined by wider palettes, although Lau never uses more than three or four colors at a time. “Green Impression” uses green to enrobe black blotches in its center, while the latter is all horizontal slabs of black intermeshing with blue, yellow and gray. Like overlooked Abstract Expressionist Bradley Walker Tomlin, Lau has here employed the rounded-corner rectangle to set up a field of activity that revolves and spins before our eyes.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.