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Home > Resources > Images from the Dark Side
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Jason Gagliardi
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Images from the Dark Side Lily Lau's cartoons are not just black humour: her new collection is a nightmare vision of urban grotesque. Jason Gagliardi ventured to the artist's abattoir studio to plumb the depths of her mind.
The world of Lily Lau is a weird one. Hunched over her sketch pad in the bowels of an abandoned abattoir in Cheung Sha Wan, the cartoonist conjures twisted vistas from Hong Kong's dark side: bleak, black-humoured, urban dystopias where claustrophobia and chaos are king.
Grotesque mechanical chim-eras-equal parts steel, plant and beast-grind away, oozing feculent effluence. A chamber of hydroponic horrors opens to reveal serried rows of weeds sprouting from foetuses. They are disturbing images: two parts Hieronymous Bosch to one part Mad magazine, with a sprinkling of gender politics and a pinch of Dr Seuss, garnished with a sprig of South Park. A cracked mirror held up to a sick city's nether parts. "Where does this stuff come from?" muses Lau, brows arched quizzically under her floppy fringe as she nests in her chair, boot-clad feet tucked up under her bottom. "I don't really know. I'm studying for a master's degree in anthropology, which I think has helped shape my view of the world. I'm trying to give hints or signs of ways to subvert restrictions. Hong Kong is such a short-sighted, selfish place. "I suppose one characteristic of my work is taking dead things or objects and making them alive. I'm trying to release life from dead things, and one of the dead things is myself, so I'm trying to come alive again through my creation."
"I moved here at the start of the year," says Lau. "I had a studio in Oil Street in North Point until they kicked us out of there. This place is cheap. All I have to pay is a couple of hundred each month for the management fee and electricity." Cheap, but far from cheerful. It's an eerie place, full of creaks, croaks and things that go bump in broad daylight. Dormant pumps squat like fat toads, offering up the odd sad gurgle in memory of slaughtered porkers. Serpentine pipes slither, rust-speckled, up walls and disappear behind greasy, idle rigs of block and tackle. "I don't know that my environment really affects my work that much," Lau says. "I guess sometimes it does-I spent three or four years living on a rooftop in Shamshuipo, which inspired the piece about the prostitute. I like to get involved with lower-class people. But really, there's all sorts of stuff in my head that just comes out. I try to combine conceptual things with daily experience. Themes that interest me are gender and sexuality, art and culture, ecology, urban life and minorities. And I guess I also draw to come to terms with the changes in my life and in my sexual preference." Major changes there have been. Lau, now 33, decided two years ago that she was a lesbian after falling in love with a woman-a fact which her spurned boyfriend wasted no time in revealing to her parents. At about the same time, after 12 years working for a Christian group, she switched to cartooning full-time to support herself, with strips in several newspapers and magazines and on various Web sites, and commissions for groups including Greenpeace and Oxfam. Her first book of cartoons, At The Bottom Of Mother's Drawers, was published two years ago, and at the Government's behest she did a book for an anti-racism campaign entitled This Is How Stars Should Really Be. She has started work on her third book, and is planning her first solo exhibition. "It feels empowering to be able to put my thoughts into comics that people can share," she says. "My parents were hurt when they found out about what had happened. It was all quite fast and it was a painful process. But I'm happy I didn't try to hide it from them and they accept my choice." Striving for catharsis seems a way of life for Lau. Even on her business card she can't resist battling her demons-a woman looks into a mirror to see something resembling Jabba The Hut staring back. She prefers to work in black and white as "it has more impact", and describes her style as "organic", explaining "I don't seem to be able to draw straight lines". She eschews exploratory pencil sketches, preferring to launch indelibly on to the page with ink. "That way my thoughts and movements aren't constrained."
She rarely delves into the cut-and-thrust of party politics, saying she's not much good at caricatures. There are enough artists doing that kind of work and she says she doesn't like being constrained by the controversy of the moment. What, then, does she think about the cheeky scribblings by a group of anonymous artists under the title Lo Mung Tung (Old Senile Managing Director)? "I think it's a bit gimmicky. I don't know the artists, but I think on the artistic and creative levels it's not very good. But it has struck a chord in many people's hearts because it shows the discontent with our leadership." Does she fear her work is unsuitable for children? "I think young kids can look at things and put their own interpretation on them. I don't think things should be kept from people because of their age. I wouldn't be uncomfortable if kids read my books." Lau collaborates with "alternative cartoonists" including Craig Au Yeung, Li Chi-tak and David Cow on a quarterly publication called Cockroach. Several copies of it are strewn across her desk, jostling for space with a Concise Oxford Dictionary, a book of David Mamet plays, and a tome entitled Hot Sex: How To Do It. So why does she choose to stay in Hong Kong, a place about which she is clearly ambivalent, to say the least. She hugs her boots tightly against her bottom and furrows her brow. "Why do I live here? I think the sense of conflict gives me the drive to create. If I was living somewhere clean and peaceful, some beautiful house in the country, I doubt I would be inspired." |
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Her second Lily's Comix compendium, Tossing And Turning: Classic Lullabies And Other Fantasies, published next month at $50, is indeed the stuff of sweat-soaked nightmares. Little girls who barricade themselves in the bathroom with their Barbie dolls, hoping for privacy, only to drown in a sea of faeces when the toilet explodes. Mei Yee the prostitute, who hoards seeds and nourishes her plants with extracts of soiled condoms and sanitary napkins, turning Shamshuipo's urban jungle into a steamy delta as Viagra makes business boom.
Lau says she has run up against censorship once or twice in her newspaper columns, but not of the political kind. "A couple of times I drew sexual organs, and that was not allowed. But I've tackled sensitive topics like the Diaoyu Islands and had no problem."