Friday, April 22, 6-8pm
Join ArtXchange Gallery for a special multi-disciplinary event featuring artist and poet Alan Lau in collaboration with sound artist Susie Kozawa. Surrounded by Lau’s latest solo painting exhibition, Beauty in the Decay, the two artists will perform sound and poetry in response to the atmosphere of the evening.
Free and open to the public
RSVPS are requested – please email info@artxchange.org
Susie Kozawa
Kozawa is a sound artist, composer and performer, works mostly with sound collages and site-specific installations, in which the gathering of sounds is a primary activity. She explores different acoustic spaces using musical instruments she makes out of found objects, kelp, modified toys, and human voice. She creates live sound design for dance, film and theater productions, as well as sound collages from field recordings of found sounds. She is also a member of Seattle Phonographer’s Union.
Kozawa has permanent public art installations with visual artist Erin Shie Palmer for the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle. She has received a number of Arts and Culture Seattle (formerly SAC) awards and was a member of their Emerging Public Artist Roster Program. She has also received an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship in Theater, and several Artist Trust GAP Awards. She is a previous Ford Foundation Collaborating Artist with Northwest Asian American Theatre’s International Artist Collaboration Project. She has been a guest artist at The International Workshop for Spatial Media hosted by the University of Aizu Wakamatsu in Japan.
Susie Kozawa image courtesy of Lincoln Potter.
Alan Lau
Artist, writer, and community organizer Alan Lau earned his BA in Art from the University of California – Santa Cruz in 1976. Post-college, Lau traveled extensively, including several visits to Japan where he studied sumi-e and brush painting at the Nanga School in Kyoto with mentor Nirakushi Toriumi. After moving to Seattle in 1978, Lau began exhibiting his artwork at Francine Seders Gallery. Lau developed a visual style that was inspired by the traditional brush painting techniques, but unfettered by strict tradition and free in his own interpretations. Primarily working on delicate Japanese rice paper, Lau layers sumi ink, watercolor, pastel, and other media to create abstract works with great depth yet surprising lightness.
In addition to his visual artwork, Lau is a published writer and poet. Collections of poetry include Songs for Jadina (1980), which won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Blues and Greens: A Produce Worker’s Journal (2000); and no hurry (2007). With Lawson Fusao Inada and Garrett Hongo, Lau authored The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 (1978). His work has appeared in anthologies such as From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas 1900–2002 (2002) and What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop (1998).
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