FIONA K. LAU

AFTER NATURE

In after nature, Fiona K. Lau examines our increasingly mediated relationship with the natural world through a series of paintings and installations that navigate the space between digital fascination and ecological crisis. The exhibition takes its title from Jedediah Purdy's book, which explores how nature as a notion of pure, untouched wilderness no longer exists—if it ever did—and asks how genuine kinship can be forged in an era when human influence has transformed every ecosystem and the internet shapes our environmental consciousness.

The works in this exhibition embody this search for connection through their very making. They function as palimpsests, layering diverse sources—personal records, Chinese literati painting, Japanese manga and pop culture, internet-sourced photographs, and AI-generated images and texts—into compositions where paint and line, figure and ground, shift and slip against one another. Strange reactions emerge between mark-making, layered imagery, fluid space and surfaces, the invisible and the visible, and emergence and disappearance in dialogue. They mirror our contemporary relationship with nature—mediated, fragmented, yet resonant.

after nature offers neither solutions nor nostalgia but rather a contemplative space to reconsider how we see, know, and care for the more-than-human world in an age of digital saturation and ecological transformation.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Fiona K. Lau is a Sacramento-based painter whose work explores the relationships of land, environment, and belonging. Born in British Hong Kong and raised in Canada, she had worked in environmental pollution research and international aid across sub-Saharan Africa. Her practice is deeply influenced by experiences of shifting cultures and a background in scientific training, creating layered works that bridge different realms of experience to reveal tensions and hidden constructs.

Lau's work has been exhibited in Seattle, Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, and internationally in Japan and Canada and is featured in public collections in Kent, WA, and Chamblee, GA. She has completed artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists' Residency, and Verge Center for the Arts in the US; OCAD University in Toronto, Canada; and AiR Yamanashi in Kofu, Japan. Lau is the recipient of the 2025 Creative Growth Fellowship awarded by the City of Sacramento's Office of Arts and Culture and is a member of Axis Gallery in Sacramento.

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