A couple of years after the turn of the millennium, photographer and author Grace Lau was in the back room of a London museum, trawling through hundreds of pages of archival photographs and documents alongside her friend, the Chinese historian Lynn Pan. The pair were working on their book Picturing the Chinese: Early Western Photographs and Postcards of China together, aiming to understand how people of different cultures in East Asia and the West interacted and influenced each other in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Alongside the documents detailing shared knowledge of ceramic making techniques and new recipes being developed as people had greater access to new foodstuffs, Grace noticed one particularly odd phenomenon. After the invention of the modern camera in 1839, a number of Europeans — often explorers or missionaries attempting to spread the word of Christianity — would take their shiny new toys to the port cities of China, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing among others, and set up photography studios where they would make portraits of locals.
But in a twisted, Victorian era-version of modern photojournalism, these pictures would be sent back to the West and paraded as examples of what life was like in the distant lands of the Far East. “They only took pictures of ‘exotic’ types,” Grace says. “Beggars, opium smokers, women with bound feet — it was always Western views of the Orient.”
Born in 1939 in London and educated in the UK as the daughter of a Chinese diplomat, Grace is no stranger to Western, exoticised views of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) people. She’s been on the receiving end of it despite over a hundred years passing since the photographs she discovered were created. “Being French myself, being Chinese, I’m always kind of the ‘other’,” she says.
In one instance, the artist was on a road trip with her friend, driving around the idyllic perimeter of Scotland. In need of more fuel, the pair stopped at a small petrol station, where an attendant walked over and greeted them. Looking at them both as Grace sat in the passenger seat, he turned to her friend and asked: “Does she speak English?”
“I just had to laugh,” Grace says now of the exchange. “There [have been] many instances of social situations when I was complimented: ‘Goodness, you do speak English well. Where did you learn it?’ always with a posh public school accent. I went to a girls’ grammar school in Highgate.”
These experiences informed Grace’s project, Portraits in a Chinese Studio, for which she has set up a mock 19th Century photography studio in a shopping centre in the English port city of Southampton, inviting passers-by to stand in as the subjects of the photographs. Opening in January on the eve of the Lunar New Year and running until 12 February, it is a continuation of her series 21st Century Types, where she set up an almost identical studio in Hastings in 2005.
“I thought, hmm, I’m a Chinese and I lived in Hastings,” Grace says. “And they had a lot of what I call ‘exotic societies’ — there were artists, fishermen, musicians and writers. They were very bohemian people. So I thought if I set up a Chinese studio there, I could reverse that historic situation and become the Chinese photographer photographing exotic Westerners.”
Her mock studio is a subversive play on orientalist visions, fitted with a Sino-generic jade-turquoise dragon façade and a mountain scene, a red paper lantern one would find dangling in the streets of Chinatown, wooden furniture reclaimed from junk shops, and a panda rug purchased from Amazon. Each of these objects play on perceptions of the Chinese aesthetic.
Setting up shop in The Marlands Shopping Centre in Southampton, anyone will is able to sit and have their photograph taken, and Grace actively invites people who particularly catches her eye. Having taken over 400 portraits during her initial Hastings run and hoping to take a similar number in Southampton, the photographs also form a documentary archive of city’s people, and, in particular, its diverse communities. From queer families to tourists from local cruise ships and children clutching smartphones — the pictures are a snapshot of English life in 2023.
“It’s reflective of Southampton as a port in the 21st Century,” Grace says. “I called the project as a whole 21st Century Types as a comment on what the British and European anthropologists and scientists called the Orientals – they called them different ‘types’. I’m asking people to come in if they have sunglasses, mobile phones. They might have ice cream cones, lots of shopping bags with Waterstones or Tesco or whatever on it. Contrasting with the old background it will hopefully emphasise the 21st Century.” Flipping the script, as the Chinese artist behind the lens, for Grace the project also subverts typical racial dynamics.
“It empowers you when you’ve got someone in front of you, and you’re telling them to pose for you,” Grace says. “I ask them to look straight into the camera, as the Victorians [did], and look very serious and not to move. As a female, a feminist and a Chinese feminist — it helped me gain confidence in my work. I think it’s an important archive because we’re such a diverse society now,” she adds. “People are changing their identities, genders, roles, everything — people are much more fluid now. And I think it’s vital to record that.”
Grace Lau’s ‘Portraits in a Chinese Studio’ takes place until 12 February 2023 at Flourish, The Marlands Shopping Centre, Southampton. For further information and to book a portrait click here. ‘Portraits In a Chinese Studio’ is part of Co-Creating Public Space, a project led by John Hansard Gallery which invites communities to creatively engage with artists to rethink the use of the public space in Southampton, and beyond.
Credits
Photography Grace Lau