Grace Lau: Chinese studio in St Leonards and cross-dressing  at Tate Britain

Grace Lau has had quite a year. Well-known in the photosphere, her projects have included Portraits in a Chinese Studio, Adults in Wonderland and Ad/dressing Death. In 2023 she recreated her Chinese studio in Southampton, London, Eastbourne and back in St Leonards. Lau is also exhibiting another body of work, Adults in Wonderland, as part of The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain. Lauris Morgan-Griffiths asked her about her year.

The Chinese portrait project began in Hastings in 2005; as with popular initiatives it doesn’t seem to want to lie down or be packed away. It was dormant for a while before being resurrected by the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, who received Arts Council Funding to instigate their Public Arts programme for 2023/24.

This second phase started in Southampton during Chinese New Year 2023, when nearly 600 visitors visited to pose. From there they were invited by the Centre for British Photography in London’s Jermyn Street, next to Fortnum and Mason, where the portrait subjects presented a different demographic profile to the South coast.

And then on for a short spell in Eastbourne, before it returned full circle to St Leonards, in June this year. This project now boasts more than 1,700 images.

Lau’s initiatives are nothing if not large conceptions. “Although my initial concept in Hastings was to document a true demographic profile of local ‘exotics’ to include tourists, fishermen, artists, musicians, diversity in community… many people prepared themselves in advance and dressed according to their self-image; people bring their own paraphanalia that reflect the identity they wish to project. It was all part of the ‘performance’ element of the portrait genre of photography.” Lau gave them the context to express their individuality in their own way, through costume or props. (More about Grace Lau and Chinese portrait studio here.)

In her various projects portrait sitters have always been given the latitude to express their individuality, whether in a Chinese portrait studio; or lying in a coffin with a prop – a bottle of wine, a carpenter’s tool –that they wished to take with them to ‘the other side,’ as in Ad/dresing Death; or as a dominatrix in a dungeon, as in Adults in Wonderland.

Grace Lau at Tate Britain

It has always made me smile since I first learned about Lau’s 1980s entree into the underground world of S&M, festishes, doms and dungeons. She is a diminutive, Chinese woman and for 10 years she entered into the fetish scene which, at that time, was very alternative and completely off the radar. 

So how did this exhibition at the Tate come about? 

Her work (four colour transparencies and three colour prints) is presented towards the end of the vast exhibition in room 9. It was selected as the Tate already have some of her portraits in their archives and they knew about her 1980s early work documenting the ‘fetish scene’.  

“I was part of the 1980s energy of activists, it was a decade of chaos and creativity.  Thatcher, strikes, AIDS, goths, new music…feminists, racists, black movement…. so much going on in UK. I had graduated in documentary photography and discovered the fetish world by chance, in an underground Soho club called The Maitresse. Maybe, because I was a ‘marginalised’ person myself, being female and Chinese, I felt drawn to the people who appeared joyous in their roles and identity. They were considered ‘bizarre and ‘anti social’ by respected society, but I was always drawn to outsiders.”

Never voyeuristic, she was fed by her curiosity and energy; consequently she was accepted by them, some becoming friends.

Photographing the fetish scene 

I remember asking photographer Malcolm Glover about whether he went naked when he was photographing men who frequented  Turkish baths in London’s East End. Of course he did, it would have been rude not to. So I ask Grace if she adopted the fetish garb when she was photographing these men. At this she erupted into her infectious laugh and said, “Oh, Lauris. Well yes, I did.” 

She spent 10 years photographing them and participating in some of their activities, and made many friends amongst the cross-dressers or transvestites that she photographed at their homes, or even the “slaves and masters” in dungeons. Lau explained she much preferred leather to rubber, which was hot, sweaty and uncomfortable. She also adopted a few props but “it did not turn me on, it was not my thing.”

Transvestites in the 80s

For the Tate exhibition curators selected the transvestites’ portraits over the S&M images, which seemed to fit their programme better. Men would come to her studio dressed in their suits, ties and brogues and carrying suitcases, would open their cases which contained make-up, wigs, corsets, flimsy underwear and dresses. The nail varnish would go on and the transformation would begin. It would all take hours as they disguised their manhood: their beards, their chest hair, before finally emerging as ‘a woman’.

They would ask her if the lipstick was the right shade, if their stocking seams were straight. From that time in the ’80s “the culture has shifted enormously, and it has become fashionable to be “trans” gender.” Forty years ago, it was all considered abnormal, anarchic and very much underground. 

Her special trick

The saying is ‘never work with children or animals’. But for the Chinese studio project “Dogs and babies are all part of the British family…cats too, but cats are difficult to contain whereas dogs are trained to behave, and my team learned a special trick to make them look up at the camera in the formal pose we requested.”

The special trick? Lau and her team learned the dogs’ names, easy for one or two, not so easy for five or seven, so when they were almost in position, Lau or a member of her team would bark at them, then, mystified by who was speaking their language, the dogs would look up, snap! and they had their image.

People came in all sort of guises. She has many personal favourites, but one that stands out for her was “the woman in red with a rabbit, which she lives with, with her dogs and a cat. Diversity can mean Harmony in this case, a lesson to be learnt in our present scary period of conflicts.”

The 80s: Photographing Britain is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, open daily 10am-6pm until 5 May, 2025. Portraits in a Chinese Studio at Solaris Print officially closed on 21 December but will be there through January – check times and openings with the gallery.

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