INTERVIEW Lau Thiam Kok
Beautiful things are rhetorical. Beauty can be a product of misery. Misery can be beauty. This is hypothetically poetic, an on-going process because many things, anything, can be poetic, it depends on the creative mind. As in Aristotle’s Poetics, my interest is to seek knowledge, explanation, and the code behind the basic human instinct. Being interested in the f lux of memory, the interaction of fiction and poetry, to what degree are the imaginary landscapes you create, with specific dates and times, a personal documentary?
Become a grandpa or a grandma Telling your grandchildren The stories from your twenties Which now you have and believe But will become then and You will doubt them. When I am old, 01.03.2004, 12:35 am, Mon.
and the Poetic as fiction: All human beings by nature are poetic. When I am old and you are gone far away, I will think of you in the fiction of my memory. I will return and from afar you will wait for me forever. Poetics, 27.05.2007, 8:55 pm, Sun.
Can you explain the relationship between DUST and its companion book, PLACE. Dust is a philosophy of dying, whereas Place is a philosophy of living through my poetic writing. They go hand in hand. One looks at the past, the other looks to the future.With the lack of either, the aim of the poetic is incomplete. Dust is a micro view in researching memory, Place is a macro view looking into memory. Dust is a reduction of memory, Place is a fiction/ creation/ generation of memory. Gaston Bachelard describes: “History is not enough. We should have to know how the forest experiences its age; why, in the reign of
Place is an imagination in a house, a city, a ruined place, or a disappeared place. It appears to be human-like, possessing human emotions. “A lamp is waiting in the window, and through it, the house, too, is waiting. The lamp is the symbol of prolonged waiting,” Gaston says. The lamp in our house doesn’t seem visible when we have company but when we are alone the solitude of the lamp, whether it is on the ceiling or sitting in the corner, reminds us of ourselves, glowing in solitude in the corner, waiting: “Through its light alone, the house becomes human. It sees like a man. Its eyes open to the night.” So a place in our imagination must be inhabited, if not by humans then by phantoms or witches, elves or monsters. An abandoned house is always haunted in our imaginations because it not inhabited. A ruin is haunting and poignant because it cannot be inhabited. Place isn’t necessarily a romantic narrative; there may be hidden codes. It is open for subjective interpretation: ‘The act of imagination, is a magical act.’ (Jean-Paul Sartre) With the launch of DUST at Plymouth Arts Centre, you’ll be distributing 1000 copies across Plymouth. What do you hope people will make of this? Dust is the result of intensive research in relating dust with memory. Packed with references on science, technology, and from literature (poetry). it can be seen as an archive. Exposure to foreign literature is rare for the majority of people here; it can be a cross-cultural interaction. Furthermore, the Mandarin/ Chinese poems are not given translation, so there is a degree of curiosity, a puzzle. The Chinese character on the cover means Time (or The Light of Time literally). So, I can phrase the English title and Chinese title as Dust in Time, bringing a deeper sense.
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lau thiam kok
War is beautiful because it enriches a f lowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, the stench of putrefaction into a symphony... Poets and artists of Futurism... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art...may be illumined by them! Filippo T.E. Marinetti (1876-1944)
Your life is a fiction When you are old and
LAU THIAM KOK uses language to create imaginary landscapes; times and dates to unfold events, spaces, and places through his work. Commissioned as part of Plymouth Arts Centre’s Artists and Curators Residency Programme, Lau will publish his book DUST in June. 1000 copies will be distributed across Plymouth: “This project aims to set the book free, to travel from place to place. Leave it at any corner of your city, on a park bench, at a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation, on the seat of the bus that takes you home, or the bookshelf in your house - anywhere it can find a place and make that place become its canvas. Then join its online f lickr group to watch and share.” Proof publishes DUST’s companion piece, PLACE, as the first in a new series of limited edition artist’s books; we mark this collaboration in an exclusive interview with this extraordinary artist
‘Poetic’ is the essential element in my searching for ideas. A piece of writing can be poetic but not a poem; a film or a book can be poetic but not poetry. Some poems are not naturally poetic but are structurally ‘poetry’. So my interest in poetry or any form of art is the poetic image in them. I collect stories, poems, writings, movie scripts or dialogues etc, as long as they are rhetorical. For example:
One day you will find
the imagination, there are no young forests. I myself can only meditate upon things in my own country, having learned the dialectic of fields and woods from my unforgettable friend, Gaston Roupnel. In the vast world of the non-I, the non-I of fields is not the same as the non-I of forests. The forest is a beforeme, before-us, whereas for the fields and meadows, my dreams and recollections accompany all the different phases of tilling and harvesting. When the dialectics of the I and the non-I grow more f lexible, I feel that fields and meadows are with me, in the with-me, with-us. But forest reign in the past. I know, for instance, that my grandfather got lost in a certain wood. I was told this, and I have not forgotten it. It happened in a past before I was born. My oldest memories, therefore, are a hundred years old, or perhaps a bit more. Then, this is my ancestral forest. And all the rest is fiction.”
Born: 1975, Penang, Malaysia / Studied: University of Malaysia Sarawak, Bachelor of Applied Arts, Advertising & Graphic Design (Multimedia); University of Plymouth Institute of Digital Art and Technology, MSc. / Lives and works: freelance, Plymouth / Medium: text, graphic design, film / Left: from Twenties, public poetry display, Plymouth 2006 /www.lauthiamkok.net
All philosophers, scientists, technologists, artists and even poets, work on the same methodology. First, they reduce the entire universe’s existence into single fragments. Afterwards, they start to rearrange, to recode, and to transform all the particles into our world again. By that, I can say, they can create nothing new, but they give us a life that we never lived nor realised before. We therefore are sublimated and enlightened by such newness and difference in this reality. Hence, we anoint them with the creative crown of origin, intellect, innovation, and sensation. 31/07/2003, 9.29 am
My interest in poetry is philosophical. The technique I practise is a kind of reductionism. I generalise personal memory and experience, with or without other recourses, to achieve a universal structure, which can have something in common with others. So my work aims to be rooted in the receiver, the reader. However, each work is linked by dates and times with my memory, and I still could consider them as my personal documentary. The definition of fiction derives from two aspects. Memory as fiction, for example:
CV
Can you explain how your books link to your wider ideas on the subject and focus of poetry. In fact my ideas about art, design, poetry, and graphics, inf luence each other. When I was little I wanted to be an artist, to draw and paint, but wasn’t allowed to by my family. Eventually I studied graphic design, advertising, and multimedia at university, and then became a designer, a web designer in particular. I have never forgotten my ambition, but rather I ‘blend in’ everything. I have also learned and realised during the process that I don’t want to paint and draw as a ‘painter’ anymore.
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