Crossing the Kamogawa in Kyoto, children in red caps wade into the shallows with nets. The scent of chrysanthemum trails a woman riding a train. A neighbor receives a cheerful makeover into vivid, Buddha-esque iconography, in good fun.
For Alan Lau, these scenes are artful postcards, creative interpretations of his experiences in Japan. “Even as adults, the child in us yearns for that place,” he writes in his artist statement for the walks along the kamogawa: the kyoto series – part 1 exhibit at ArtX Contemporary. For him, that place is a humble, sunstruck upstairs room in his wife Kazuko’s century‑old Kyoto home—six tatami mats, a crumbling whitewash, laundry lines, a thin blue blanket over newspaper so he can paint and make a mess.
When the studio constricts, Lau steps out to one of the many gardens and temples, or he walks two blocks to Kamogawa.
“The Kamogawa River shreds through the city of Kyoto as its own historic landmark. The banks are the city’s tapestry, or recreation,” Lau said in a recent interview with the International Examiner—the publication where he has also served as arts editor for over 30 years. By the river, one sees cheerleaders drilling formations, a drummer practicing Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time,” as well as “school groups harvesting specimens, egrets, coots, and herons pause between stones as hawks etch circles overhead,” Lau said. “The river becomes a chronometer for the year—miso‑colored torrents after days of rain, a single child’s pink flip‑flop spinning downstream, ramen cups, kamaboko boards, then the quiet turn toward autumn as banks go brighter by degrees.”
In the artwork titled living in the city where you can never find me (2018), cityscape, expressed as an abstraction of the Kamogawa and downtown’s tangle, presents Kyoto’s chromatic blues and greys. “Kyoto has always been a popular tourist destination and was the Capitol of Japan for centuries,” Lau writes in his artist statement. “It is a treasure chest of history dotted with countless temples, shrines and gardens. But after Covid was lifted and the yen weakened, tourists poured in by the hundreds, literally making Kyoto the new Venice of Asia.”
“Some day, this old house too will be reduced to rubble,” Lau later muses. “But for now, the fragrance of freshly ground ink pools in water and mixes with the smell of newly washed laundry. It is still my safe space.”
Lau was raised in Paradise, California—long before the devastating fire rewrote that town’s name as elegy—where his father opened The Pagoda, a classic chop‑suey Chinese restaurant, after a white friend testified to his character before the Chamber of Commerce. In a place without a Chinatown or family association, his grandmother held the culture together: New Year’s candy trays and salted watermelon seeds, red envelopes in exchange for Hakka greetings, practical calligraphy lessons. The smell of ink stayed with him. So did Sunday funnies and the freedom to make messes with watercolor once the characters were done.
Lau traces the origins of his artistic lineage to a kitchen table in Paradise, California, where his grandmother, the epicenter of Chinese culture for the family’s lone Chinese American household, placed translucent paper over model characters, guided small hands, and taught their calligraphic foundations to a young Alan: ren (person), jia (house), nan and nu, da and xiao, “good,” “prosperity.” His first lessons were in bottled Chinese and Japanese inks.
Decades later, in Kyoto, Lau formally studied Nanga, Japan’s literati‑painting lineage modeled from Chinese literati under sensei Toriumi Nirakushi. “It wasn’t that romantic master–disciple myth,” Lau said. “I sat on tatami with Japanese housewives. Each week, Toriumi painted a model—bamboo, cherry blossom, mountains, and the next week circled our mistakes in orange ink.” What he learned was not to become a courtly specialist of ink bamboo, not to “catch up” to those raised on the brush since childhood. Instead he grew to love the process and material itself: water, paper, ink. “Sumi is unforgiving,” he said. “There’s beauty in not being able to control it. Eventually, the painting tells you where it wants to go.”
Before sumi, there was also San Francisco and the long echo of the 1960s: psychedelic posters, light shows, Peter Max neons, Yellow Submarine, finger‑painting color squeezed from tubes and pushed around with hands. Listening to distant AM‑radio DJs like Wolfman Jack after midnight, working as a rock band’s roadie, transferring through student uprisings and ethnic studies strikes, hitchhiking across islands–all these experiences influenced Lau’s life, humility, community activism, and artmaking. Out of the creative patchwork quilt of Lau’s life flows an artistic practice that is disciplined and porous, fluid, dynamic, and peaceful.
After a rocky college freshman year, he fell in with a fledgling rock band and moved to San Francisco—gigs at the Avalon Ballroom, The Matrix, the Straight Theater. When the road life frayed, he returned to school as campus movements for ethnic studies collided with police. A first trip to Japan opened a new cognition: “Everyone looks like you; you don’t have to justify your existence.” Later, he traveled widely via a sister’s wedding in Copenhagen and arrived penniless in Kyoto with a plan to study an art form—any art form—that would take him deeper. Teaching English paid rent while brush painting under Toriumi Nirakushi became a weekly practice at the kitchen table alongside ordinary people. “He taught me the bones,” Lau said. The rest, he had to find for himself.
The walks along the kamogawa exhibit at ArtX Contemporary juxtaposes many creations through its clearings, urbanity, and of course, its gardens. The art has a way of gobbling up every inch of space, almost a metaphor for nature’s boundless spreading, trimmed and unruly qualities. Kyoto has gardens for every mood: raked rock, borrowed mountain, moss perspective.
“There’s also the produce,” Lau admitted, smiling, when I asked about vegetables that keep surfacing in the work. For more than thirty years he labored at Uwajimaya’s back‑of‑house with napa, bok choy, kabocha. Alan was “an old private in the produce army,” he insists, never a manager—and that tactile knowledge enters the picture quietly, the way a cook seasons by feel. In the show’s most saturated work (the piece on the exhibition card), sliced napa and cross-sections of squash are almost legible color as nourishment, composition built from the everyday abundance of the market.
Perspective matters, too. The Kyoto garden is often seen from a seated posture—low and frontal, a horizon of plantings opening onto distance. Lau composes his art from that height, “tatami‑level,” which is also the height of the child at the table tracing characters, the worker crouched to trim roots, the visitor pausing under the lintel to remove shoes. His paintings frequently attempt what he described as a “micro–macro pull”—from the doorway, an atmosphere; up close, nests of line, hand‑drawn gesture upon gesture, proof of the human in the mark. He emphasized, “I treasure the individual mark made by hand, the evidence of human gesture. That’s important to me.”
Lau notes Heaven as one of the show’s dedications—both to the jazz singer Jimmy Scott and to Uragami Gyokudō, the 18th‑century poet‑painter‑musician whose mountains resemble “giant potatoes or loaves of bread,” imagined landscapes rendered as reiterating rhythms of line. Gyokudō’s strokes of ink were built of rhythm, power, and dynamic color. Lau recounts the art history he learned in Kyoto while training as inspiring him: the artist Hasegawa Tohaku (1539 – 1610), whose kinpeki shouhekiga pine mist and gold leaf murals at Chishku-in “float between dreams and modern abstraction”; Nagasawa Rosetsu’s (1754-1799) dragon and tiger painted with flamboyant flourishes drifted from superlative realism; Soga Shōhaku’s (1730-1781) monochromatic coils applied with ink-drenched mops; Tomioka Tessai’s (1827-1924) saturated vigor against the gentler calligraphic hand of his mentor, Otagaki Rengetsu. Tessai’s vibrant palette, and chaotic energy filled every inch of space with humor, and was considered a Japanese Impressionist. Alan finds kinship in these great Japanese Brush painters, and within the global contemporary Northwest School, Arte Povera, Abstract Expressionism, and Outsider art.
One of the most generous aspects of Lau’s approach as an exhibiting artist is his insistence that the show is not finished when the works are hung. “You have to make as many avenues as you can for people to meet the art,” he told me. For this first installment of walks along the kamogawa: the kyoto series, he organized a gallery walk‑through where musician friends performed their responses to pieces they chose, explaining why one painting pulled them and translating that pull into sound. Dancers may enter the frame next. Poetry—his own and others’—braids with sound art and saxophone.
Lau’s ethos of inclusion runs back to his student days at San Francisco State. The strike for Ethnic Studies, he said, “imprinted the importance of giving something back to the community.” In Seattle, that commitment has taken the form of decades of writing and editorial work for the International Examiner, a role he downplays the way he downplays rank in a grocery hierarchy. “Perfection doesn’t exist,” he said. “I’m more of a messy explorer than a perfectionist.” But he is adamant about the necessity of arts coverage. “Art is the soul of any community culture.”
When asked whether Kyoto shifts his attention, and whether Seattle rests in his head as he paints, he answers that “it’s all intuitive.”
“Every painting begins with a void. You can’t bask in what you did before. You plunge into the blank and see what happens,” he said. “Some artists work in tight series. I don’t as much. Each picture is a new challenge. I have a pile of failed paintings for collage.”
Art history in Kyoto is not isolated in vitrines. It lives in market streets and temple precincts, stone guardians and fan shops, markers along paths, and small museums in provincial towns. Lau picked favorite elders—Jakuchū, Taiga, Buson, Tōhaku, Rosetsu, Shōhaku, Gyokudō, Tessai—and learned how to translate their sensibilities into his modernity. If his own work is largely abstract now, the old literati spirit persists: a cultivated disregard for virtuosity for its own sake; a willingness to let the painting think with you; the sense that a line, rightly placed, can be both thunderhead and whisper.
Throughout his decades in Seattle, including his long tenure at Uwajimaya, Alan Lau has consistently translated his physical experiences and commitment to community into his art. Refusing to sentimentalize his labor, he infused his poems and paintings with a tangible attention to weight, ripeness, and cut edges, capturing how color ‘thuds or glows.’ This same ethos of engagement extends to his exhibitions, where he actively convenes musicians and dancers, believing that standing still in front of a wall is merely one way of encountering art and fostering community connection
Standing again in that upstairs room in Kyoto with paper laid over a blue blanket over tatami, laundry ropes zig‑zagging the space, we ponder how artists inherit the simple rooms that art requires. A place with light. A tatami mat on the floor. A kitchen table. A river. A way to make a mark and then another. Lau’s work invites us into that ordinariness and shows how the ordinary, attended to, becomes inexhaustible.
Part 1 of walks along the kamogawa weaves works across multiple years, with the Kyoto body as an engine supplemented by earlier paintings. Lau returns to Kyoto often—“a month or two at a time,” and unrolls recent work long after it was made. He imagines this series as three installments. Part 2 will resume when Lau and his wife Kazuko return to Japan in the spring to paint again “between ropes of wet laundry.”
If you go: walks along the kamogawa: the kyoto series — part 1. Venue: ArtX Contemporary
