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 a large series of hand-carved woodblock portraits of his friends. In a deliberate inversion of the standard relief-printing relationship, the inked wooden plates themselves — rather than the paper impressions pulled from them — were foregrounded as the principal artwork, making the durable carved object, not the sheet, the primary art object. The title invokes both the 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 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 (Art Project Gallery) 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 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, the demolished "twin" of the surviving Cassels 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.

In 2023 Lau received 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), 'Universality and Particularity: Woodcut Portraits in Asia' at 1A Space (2022), and 'Debordering: Woodcut Printmaking Practice in Inter-Asian Context' at Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan (2023, co-curated by Krystie Ng). His work is represented by SC Gallery in Hong Kong.

Across a continuing serial project, Lau's iconography engages Hong Kong's colonial-era public statuary and monuments, often placing them in ironic relationship with his own self-portrait, extending the visual vocabulary of his woodcut-portrait practice. Within the contemporary Hong Kong print scene, his combination of HKOP residency, CUHK training, and ambitious large-format woodcut output places him among the notable young voices of the post-2019 Hong Kong print generation.