Grace Lau, Winner of the GSPA Betser Prize 2024

My parents are both from Sichuan, China, and came to London in 1937 where I was born in 1939. My father was a diplomat with former President Chiang Kai-Shek’s Chinese Embassy in London.

I relate to all aspects of Chinese culture, in particular their love of fine cuisine and good dining; their Confucian philosophy for hard work, respect for elders, and many other ancient ideas. My father was a Confucian scholar, a fine calligrapher and strict father with traditional Chinese values. My mother was a poet and became a fine cook despite never having worked in a kitchen before coming to the UK; she comes from a wealthy landowner family.

My photography career was in spite of being Chinese. My parents wanted me to become a scientist or other “respectable” career as artists were not highly regarded. I discovered photography whilst travelling overland in Asia during the 1960/70s and wanted to document my travel experiences. So I took a degree course at a technical college, now known as Westminster College of Art, and then while I was teaching photography at London College of Communications, I took an MA Degree there.

My project, “21st Century Types” became successful in terms of taking my travelling Chinese Portrait Studio to several cities in the Southeast of England, including London, Southampton, Eastbourne and Hastings, and has resulted in a book called “Portraits in a Chinese Studio”, as well as many media interviews, articles and exhibitions.  I would like my Portrait Studio to also visit China, and the team at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton are investigating that possibility.

This project started in 2005 soon after I moved to Hastings, where I noticed the vibrant diversity and edginess of the communities in that seaside town. For my first book on “Picturing the Chinese” which addressed the depiction by Imperialists and colonialists of ethnic people in “exotic” overseas countries, I had carried out research in archives and collections of vintage portraits taken soon after the invention of the camera in 1840s. These portraits revealed an assumption by the photographers (white colonialists) of the superiority of their own race, in comparison to the “primitive types” they had met overseas.

My own concept was to respond to the stereotyping by Western photographers and reverse the roles with myself being the empowered photographer making portraits of ‘exotic’ British seaside ‘types’, in a typical Victorian-style portrait studio which I set up in an art gallery on the Hastings seafront. With funding from the Arts Council, I scouted the local antique shops to purchase Oriental type furniture, and even found a fake panda rug in a junk shop which makes reference to the tiger and bear skins hunted by Victorians.

I was surprised by the popularity of my first Portrait Studio, and enjoyed the experience of meeting so many diverse people, including local artists, families with 3 generations, tourists from abroad, musicians, and being summer, there were more visitors to the seaside, eating ice-creams, fish and chips, wearing swimming/beach clothes, with their sunglasses and mobile phones and coke bottles which I asked them to keep in the picture to illustrate a discrepancy between the modern ‘types’ and my old mock-Victorian studio.

More than 400 portraits were taken, and a selection was chosen for a Tate Britain exhibition on British photography in 2008. I enjoyed other exhibitions in Photofusion London and Aberystwyth, Wales. Subsequently, a new selection was selected for a major exhibition at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, entitled “Seaside Photographed” in 2018, which toured to the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton.

Later I was invited to install my portrait studio, with Arts Council funding, in a popular shopping arcade in Southampton during Chinese New Year in 2022. Since then, the Studio has been busy gathering a huge archive of 21st Century Types which I hope will be housed in a museum archive.

The whole experience has been a big learning curve for me, in terms of how people enact in front of the camera; their behaviour and choice of clothing to project their identities and what their accessories mean. What is also an essential and significant point that I have noticed: the harmony of so many diverse types, the integration of races, the mixed-marriage families with their beautiful children, the multi-generational families; the students from the Middle East, Asia, and of all religious denominations, posing together, living harmoniously and they are all ‘ordinary’ people in our vast society. That has crucially struck a cord and gives hope for us all.