Fetish & Fantasy – Grace Lau
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Since the early 1980s, Grace Lau’s photographic journey through sexuality, gender identity and sado-masochistic subculture has explored a world largely hidden from mainstream view. Fetish Stories brings together a selection of works from a ten-year period in which Lau immersed herself in these subcultures, from her earliest male nudes and documentation of ‘Skin Two’ events and dominatrices’ dungeons, to later work exploring cross-dressing and changing ideas around sexuality and identity.
Club Scene
“That period was an extraordinary journey into the subversive world of fetishism, when I visited specialised clubs and dominatrix dungeons and entered the private lives of ordinary people to document their performative fantasies. Fetish Stories is a small selection of what I observed and participated in with my camera,” she writes.
“I never actually took part myself, although I dressed up because it’s easier to get in with the people when you’re dressed up. I did six-inch high heeled shoes, leather gear. It looked fine,” she told me. The “scene” she photographed was during the 1980s and 1990s, and she doesn’t think that it’s the same now as it was. “There were clubs, underground clubs, all throughout London and most of the bigger cities – Bristol, Manchester. They had annual balls. I think they still have parties where people dress up, because a friend of mine gets paid money to make latex suits and fancy dresses, particularly for men.”
About the nature of their resulting fantasies Grace says: “The sex part wasn’t so important. What was in their heads wasn’t to do with sex, it was to do with their roles, their fantasies, and how they looked as a woman.” She interviewed many of them for (what was) her BA thesis, and “they didn’t mind as long as I didn’t reveal their identity, but they always wore masks anyway.” Some of them were prominent people – bankers, judges, teachers, police. They called themselves transvestites. Significantly, one banker “said he enjoyed the punishment in his public school more than anything else.”
Like her recent Chinese Studio series, this was a 20-year project. After 10 years she got her photography degree then continued, “because the photographs were wonderful.” Also, she made a living, because people paid her to come to the studio and have photos of themselves taken, dressed up. “It was mostly men … the routine, the ritual of getting transformed into a woman was the actual turn on bit.” And at the time (before mobile phones or digital cameras) there was no easier way of recording their fetish. Because she could do it, she was accepted on the scene as a photographer – “also, I think because I was non-threatening as a small, Chinese, middle-aged woman.”
The dominatrix dungeons too, Lau found fairly revealing. “A lot of men liked to shed their responsibilities and their daily routines, their ‘real life’, and act out fantasies of being enslaved by beautiful women.” She has dominatrices and ‘dungeons’ in this show, but not too many as she didn’t want the exhibition to be “just salacious.” And it was, Lau goes on, “99 per cent men.”
Small and non-threatening she may be, but Lau’s esoteric and courageous documentary work has been exhibited widely, including at Tate Britain, the National Portrait Gallery, Turner Contemporary, the Museum of London and Towner Gallery. Recent exhibitions include The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain (2024–25), which included some of the works featured in this exhibition. All the works are for sale – some uniquely, as the negatives have been lost in the mists of time.
This article appears with acknowledgement to Grace Lau’s bio at gracelau.co.uk. The exhibition runs until 31 October at Solaris Print, 76 Norman Road St Leonards, open Wednesdays-Saturdays.
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