Alvin Lau

Malaysian photographer on the limits of photography 
By Lim Sheau Yun

At 7pm on 19 June 2021, steel scaffolding on the DASH highway under construction in Malaysia’s Klang Valley collapsed. It left two workers injured. Images were quick to circulate online: rebar penetrating violently out of solid concrete, bent from gravity’s pull; the neon orange of a tractor’s grappling hook pulls a chain, which in turn is tenuously connected to a fallen scaffold wrapped in blue and green mesh, all lit in the imperious afterglow of a too hot, too sticky evening. These pictures are infrastructure porn, evoking the perverse pleasure of seeing concrete megaliths fall apart under their own physical and symbolic weight. Two days later, however, news reports were reassuring: highway traffic flow was back to normal, no concern needed. Few outlets cared to mention that one of the injured workers had died.

This disconnect is what grounds the work of Kuala Lumpur-based photographer Alvin Lau. Infrastructure, in his reading, is deeply ironic. Highways, bridges, and roads are meant to seamlessly connect people, but the pursuit of frictionless travel leaves a story of urban detritus and human loss. What goes into the making of infrastructure? What temporaries serve to make these concrete monuments? How do we, in turn, turn these fleeting forms into monuments themselves?

Alvin Lau, ‘Borderline’, 2020. Images courtesy of the artist.

Each image in Alvin’s ‘Borderline’ series, completed in 2020, takes a structure and makes it into a monument, blurring the language of industrial landscapes and platonic forms. A pile of bricks becomes a ziggurat, a fence cuts across the page in perfect two-point perspective, a twig-like tree trunk pleads to be read as a straight line. Vitruvius’s rules for architecture, ‘firmitas’, ‘utilitas’ and ‘venustas’, i.e., commodity, firmness, and delight, come to mind. Alvin’s subjects sit heavy and assuredly in the space of the photograph but are likely to disappear in the space of days or months, once the bricks are used, the sand has filled uneven ground, and another edifice is completed. These images are testaments to instances of the liminal state between built and unbuilt; instances that can only be captured in the instant click of a photographer’s lens.

But what gives Alvin’s images their defamiliarizing sense of time, that is, its ability to capture in an instant, is also what he sees as photography’s failure as a medium. Too often, Alvin gripes, photograph is seen as a tool to communicate pure information. The ease of taking a photograph— and its consequential profligate circulation— has made it a useful tool for disinformation and propaganda. 

“The world Alvin creates, however, is not very habitable. The fantasy of infrastructure is also the fantasy of the authoritarian masculine, a coupling the political scientist Cara Daggett has termed “petro-masculinity.” ”

In contrast, for Alvin, observation becomes a critical practice. He first became seriously interested in photography to combine his various interests, including walking, cycling, and narrative storytelling. In his walks and bike rides around Sentul, where he grew up, and around Kuala Lumpur, he honed a particular eye for interpreting the unceasing development around him. His photographs create a different version of reality. It is slightly detached, slightly too cool-toned for near-the-equator light, and highly idealised. In this sense, Alvin’s photographic practice is not dissimilar to writing creative non-fiction. Accumulated, his photographs set a foundation of context, creating a gateway into the world through his eyes. The photograph, like a piece of infrastructure, is a way to get from one place to another.

The world Alvin creates, however, is not very habitable. The fantasy of infrastructure is also the fantasy of the authoritarian masculine, a coupling the political scientist Cara Daggett has termed “petro-masculinity.” If the infrastructure porn of the DASH highway is the grainy phone picture with “Forwarded many times” warnings in Whatsapp groups, then Alvin’s is the hyper-produced 2020s-era Playboy editorial. In a series of pictures of construction fences, these stark and strong structures cut violently across the page, creating clear border lines in the middle of the image. These images hint at their own shortcomings. Just like how construction sites are inaccessible to a wider public, Alvin’s beautiful images are apparitions from a familiar lineage of the world of the petro-masculine.

Alvin Lau, ‘Borderline’ (2020). Images courtesy of the artist.

In our conversation, Alvin hinted that he had begun to explore a world beyond the still photograph. Perhaps the moving image? Perhaps installation? In September 2020, to exhibit ‘Borderline,’ Alvin printed them on vinyl and pasted them on the fence behind the Zhongshan Building— which had just been built— to mark the closure of a forested road and to hail the arrival of a new apartment. To this day, no one has come to remove the photographs. May they stand as monuments to the transitory.

Click here to read our dialogue with Alvin Lau.