We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau’s relationship with his estranged father. Lau’s father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau’s life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father’s sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. During their final week together, they collaborated on a photographic project that documented his father’s unsuccessful path toward recovery. After his father’s passing, Lau returned to his hometown in Hawai‘i seeking closure, uncovering hidden correspondence that revealed previously unknown parts of his father’s life. Entrusted with dispersing his father’s ashes across O‘ahu, the artist began working with his grandparents to reconstruct this fragmented family history through photography. Brian Van Lau is a self-taught photographer currently based between Honolulu, HI and Los Angeles, CA. His work is about finding fictitious evidence. His first monograph, We’re Just Here For the Bad Guys, was published by Light Work in 2026, alongside a solo exhibition of the same name, and Oracle in the Aperture, a group show curated under his press and platform, Arcanite Pictures. He is a 2025 Penumbra Workspace Artist-in-Residence, a 2024 Google x Aperture Creator Labs Fund recipient, a 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize Runner-up, and founded Arcanite Pictures in 2022, an online platform and project space dedicated to highlighting emerging lens based artists. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, Vogue, The New York Times, Aperture, and many more.
