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  • Many-Layered Visions:Maria Lau
  • Alexandra Chang (bio)

A city with its infrastructure negotiating the effects of time, Havana, Cuba, is known for the beauty of the patina of peeling neoclassical facades and well-conditioned vintage cars from years and makes long past. But the beauty of these cars and facades, as captured in artist Maria Lau's photographs, tells a deeper story than one of surface beauty for the daytripper. The cars and crumbling buildings, increasingly being renovated into photo-ops and bed and breakfasts for a burgeoning tourist trade, are evidence of a place caught in the legacy of a decades-old cold war embargo, preventing the flow of goods and monies yet at the same time experiencing an increased ease in international travel, including most recently with its US neighbor, just a 90-minute plane ride to the north. It's this allure of the past in the present that oft en serves as the att raction of an international tourist industry that has also become the main driver of Cuba's economy.

One of the works in this selection shows the very recognizable image of a Santería practitioner in ceremonial white dress that is oft en seen in the Havana plazas, where the women, also participating in the cultural tourist trade, sit posing in traditional dress, smoking cigars for photographs and offering to read your future.

New Jersey–based artist Maria Lau mainly works in photography and installation. Her investigation into her personal family history took her to Havana's Barrio Chino to learn more about her father and his Chinese Cuban family. Her search for his story led her to one of the so-called family associations that help not only with issues facing the diasporic community but also with sett ling newly arrived individuals, and have served to document the Chinese coming into Cuba for the past two centuries. Going back to one's "homeland" and retracing family roots is a rite of passage for many immigrants. One of the first stops for those of Cuban Chinese background is oft en to visit one of the many family associations hidden in plain sight on the streets of the Barrio Chino—a neighborhood on the brink of disappearing owing to the exodus of its younger generations in search of jobs elsewhere on the island.

The photos here are a part of a multiyear photo series started in 2003, known collectively as the 71 Project, which consists of three parts, respectively titled: A Cuban Chinese Dream; Fragments of a Dream; and Memory and Identity. The series implements a multiple exposure in-camera technique that Lau utilizes to create a layered dreamlike effect. These layered images hint at the multitiered narratives [End Page 141] in her photographs stemming from her unique positionality. Lau is returning to a place with which she was previously physically unacquainted, yet to which she was already deeply connected through her family's histories and memories and her own imaginings, as well as through the Chinese Cuban diasporic community and the ongoing relationship of the US and Cuba. The images convey both the faded glamour of the 1950s and the long history of Cuba through the effects of cold war politics, layered onto the histories of the Chinese family associations and diasporic communities that appear through Lau's images of the last Chinese-language newspaper, Diario Popular Chino, and the forgotten porticos in the Barrio Chino. A mural noting the line from the mythologized independence movement—"No hubo un chino cubano desertor. No hubo un chino cubano traidor…"—is overlaid with a trademark vintage US car, giving a sense of the Chinese community's presence in relation to the everyday culture and history of Cuba.

In her work Dad Divination, a portrait of Lau's father at age twenty is similarly superimposed, but instead of on a building or automobile, his image is layered upon a scattering of divination sticks. During her first visit to the family association Lung Kong at the outset of her journey, Lau was asked to a prayer room to pick a numbered divination stick, which revealed the number 71. For the artist, this number had multiple significances...

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