Sarah Lai

“Kyuusekkin! (Love SOS)” takes its theme from the culture of Japanese anime, which was widely popular in Asia in the 1980s-90s. Back in the days, prior to widespread advances in computer-generated imagery (CGI), cartoon animations were all hand-drawn. Animators efficiently narrate storylines in simple and significant scenes, drawing them in clean, minimal outlines without redundant details. Lai regards the cartoon animation from this era as an exemplar of effective visual language and communication, in addition to being a collective memory shared by a whole generation.

Fabrics, textiles and clothes can transmit forgotten memories through materiality, linking together the past and the present. In Slide Through the Curtain of Night, Lai stages an expansive spatial installation to recall the experiences of retail department stores in 1990s Hong Kong.

In this painting series, Sarah Lai borrows close-up images of TV advertisement from the 1980s-1990s, to capture the aesthetics of femininity presented by the media of a bygone era.

Flowing, is inspired by a TV shampoo advertisement, and depicts the moment when a female model flips her hair in a motion of enjoyment. Creating the same image twice with cold and warm hues respectively, Lai highlights the display discrepancy in analog cathode-ray tube TVs. For Lai, these old images exude an affect that our current age evades. What is lost, nowadays, in the hyper cleanliness of political correctness, is a sense of transgressive seduction and imaginative play.

With a signature low-contrast pale palette, Lai depicts a hand in a white glove, waving. In the video, the artist gathers and edits numerous footages and still images of Queen Elizabeth II in public events, crops out the Queen’s waving hand and blacks out the rest. The gloved hand is devoid of warmth, ambiguous in intention: is the waving handing greeting, declining or bidding farewell? Through the iconography of the white gloves, Lai reflects on the hypocritical nature of colonialism, as well as the undecidability of politics. At the same time, Lai satirises Hong Konger’s idealised memory of the British rule.

Lai draws inspiration from her experience of the following celebrities on Instagram. Premised on the logic of openly sharing daily life for recognition, social media platforms breed a sense of virtual intimacy despite physical distance, a feeling of incessant performance to meet a status quo of deliverable, and lingering emotion within its followers. Lai examines this manufactured closeness in her paintings, using zoomed-in views of celebrity tattoos and retouched skin as a basis for the re-contextualisation of the sensitivities of social intimacy, to create a vulnerable space between familiarity and abstract sentiment.