Ealing Photographer Features on Cover of The London Magazine

Martin Lau won competition run at SET Studios

A detail from Martin Lau's 'Boats'

February 1, 2024

The work of a photographer from Ealing is to feature on the cover of the next edition of The London Magazine.

A photomontage piece from Martin Lau titled National Gallery from his series Alteration was chosen following a competition run in conjunction with SET Studios at the end of last year.

The magazine also has published an in-depth interview with Martin covering his artistic process and thoughts about identity and dualism.

Martin, is a visual artist and musician based in Ealing, born to Chinese immigrants from Singapore and Hong Kong. His says he aims to explore the elusive territories that exist on the fringes of reality, in the in-between spaces where dualities blur. Informed by his affinity for Buddhist philosophy, he explains that he is seeking to unveil the interconnectedness of seemingly opposing elements, challenging conventional binaries. This pursuit weaves a consistent thread through his art, where he employs digital montage techniques, often using his own photographs.

The London Magazine is England's oldest literary magazine, first published in 1732, with past contributors including Joseph Conrad, George Orwell and Sylvia Plath.

Martin said, “You can imagine how encouraged (and somewhat flummoxed!) I feel to play a small part in their publication's history. And this was all made possible by my having an affordable studio space hosted by SET. Many, many thanks to them and to the magazine for this wonderful opportunity.”

Pictures from his early childhood have been used in the Alteration series although Martin rarely took pictures of people in his early days as a photographer focusing on industrial estates, dual carriageways and municipal and corporate environments.

Martin Lau - Cowboy

He says of the switch to using these early photos, “This felt like a quantum leap on multiple levels, and quite intimidating. I was going to be laying bare my own life, and the techniques I had evolved from my photography practice were going to be applied to images where not only was I not the photographer, but where I myself was the object being captured by a camera under the control of another person, generally a parent. So it was some time again before I started scanning and working on these images. Looking back at my earlier work, full of concrete structures and discarded objects, I now realise that it was always utterly personal and suffused with my own life history, regardless of how much I thought otherwise.”

He went to a local primary school in the seventies when there was a bussing programme in which children from a South Asian backgrounds from nearby Southall, were taken en masse by bus to attend schools outside their neighbourhoods in an attempt to encourage integration. He says this imbued them with a difference adding, “the kids that I spent all my time hanging around with at that age were ‘coach children’, so in my eyes they were the in-group, and the local kids were more peripheral.”

Due to his Chinese heritage he has questioned how much this accounts for the sense of ‘otherness’ which comes out in Alteration but he acknowledges that many artists feel like outsiders in their formative years, regardless of their ethnicity.

Martin is a curator for Ealing Extranormal, a space for experimental musicians and sound artists. He says of this role, “Previously I had worried about fulfilling some sort of imagined expectation of what an event or show should be, but now I use the same instincts that I would when creating a piece, except that here the ‘medium’ happens to be amazing artists who have done all the hard work already.”

SET is an artist-led charitable organisation and studio provider operating across eight London locations. It transforms vacant buildings into affordable workspace and says that out of 13,500 artists that hold work space in London, 1,000 have studios at SET.

The Ealing location is at 105-113 St James House, Broadway, (W13 9BE).