2023

Acrylic on canvas
130 x 97 cm

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Mars yellow 20230517 is a painting that is evidently bigger than many of Lai’s other paintings. Generally speaking, he prefers a painting process that is intimate, involving mostly wrist movements—the gestural aspect of large paintings have to be more deliberate. The rules for creating a process-based painting as such are as follows: “Against the physical borders of the canvas, I try to establish two new borders without using additional tools. As I was about to finish the smearing, I left as a final touch a blank spot, resembling a call that is incomplete. The process and method also correspond to the ways in which I explore gaps, boundaries, fullness and emptiness in other forms and in life.” T he production of liminal and central blankness (the beginning and end of the painting process), resembling the movement of writing and inscribing, effectively scars a monochrome-d surface, rendering it somehow non-identical to itself. Whether one thing is identical to itself is, after all, a major concern for Lai’s art. Lai: “For me, painting is ontological, concerning traces, instead of subjects and contents.”

2023.05.25-07.08 “It's a quiet thing", Kiang Malingue, 10 Sik On Street, Hong Kong