Jay Lau Ka-chun

Jay Lau Ka-chun (劉家俊, b. 1997, Si Bei Ling Village, Huidong County) is a Hong Kong-based printmaker, photographer, and installation artist whose practice investigates mechanical reproduction techniques — printmaking, photography, and mould-making — as systems for the creation and re-creation of images. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2019 and a Master of Fine Arts from the same institution in 2023. He is best known for ambitious woodcut-portrait series that compress contemporary Hong Kong politics, colonial-era image-objects, and the dynamics of physical mark-making into a single recognizable visual register.

Lau's first major project, 'Woodcut Portraits 2020-2021: This too shall (not) pass' (Hong Kong Open Printshop, 2021), comprised more than fifty hand-carved woodblock portraits of his friends. In a deliberate inversion of the standard relief-printing relationship, the inked wooden plates and their cement recasts were exhibited as the principal artwork rather than as the matrix for a paper edition — making the durable carved object, not the impression on paper, the primary art object. The title invokes both the talmudic adage 'this too shall pass' and the embodied limit of carving: as Lau noted in interviews around the show, days of ten-hour carving sessions cause physical pain in the shoulders, and the work registers that bodily duration as part of the print's meaning.

Lau received the Hong Kong Fine Print Award from HKOP in 2019, the year of his BFA graduation, and was selected as artist in residence at HKOP for 2019-2020. He worked alongside experienced HKOP printmakers Lee Mei-kuen, Cheung Chung-chu, and Fung Ho-yin during his residency, and continues to circulate through the HKOP exhibition programme. The 2023 MFA graduation exhibition 'Void' (CUHK) and the 2022 'Regarding the Indifference of Us' solo show extended the woodcut-portrait line into more politicized territory, addressing the social conditions of young people in post-2019 Hong Kong.

In 2026 Lau presented 'Incising the Matrix: If Birdwood Block' at the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, an exhibition built around Old Victoria Barracks archival photographs that he processed through image-editing software and AI-image generation tools, then transferred to woodcut. The resulting print series — 'Fictional Scenery' and 'Reversed Scenery' — construct a parallel reality of Birdwood Block through the artist's signature combination of carved-relief image-making and contemporary digital iconography. The project was developed during his residency at the Visual Arts Centre and exemplifies his interest in how mechanical-reproduction techniques across centuries (woodcut, photography, AI-generated imagery) intersect to produce historically layered images.

Lau's 2023 MFA dissertation work earned the WMA Graduation Award and the Liu Shiming Scholarship in Fine Arts. He has exhibited internationally — group shows include 'Nothin' Like the Taste of Print' at Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong (2022) and 'Universality and Particularity: Woodcut Portraits in Asia,' curated by Krystie Ng at 1A Space (2022) — alongside group exhibitions in Japan and elsewhere across Asia. His work has been represented through SC Gallery (Hong Kong) and shown through the AISHO platform.