Sarah Lai
Black Star
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Sarah Lai
b. 1983, Hong Kong
Sarah Lai obtained her BA in Fine Arts in 2007, and MFA in 2016, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Lai’s paintings depict objects from daily lives, represented by her signature pale palette and a particular stillness imbued with material memories. In her most recent practice, Lai uses as inspiration images from films, TV and advertisement of the 1980s-90s, capturing the aesthetics of sensuality presented by the media of a bygone era, and articulating a delicate subtlety in personal experiences and memories.
Lai has held solo exhibitions that include “In Stasis” (Para Site, Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2015) and participated in group exhibitions such as “(In)tangible Reminiscence” (Center for Heritage Arts & Textiles, Hong Kong, 2018); “Against the Light: Sampling in Two Cities” (Frank F. Yang Art and Education Foundation, Shenzhen, China, 2017); “From Ocean to Horizon” (Center for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester, UK, 2017); “Inception” at the 5th Art Sanya (Sanya, China, 2016); and “The 2nd CAFAM Future Exhibition” (CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2015).
Lai currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
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Slide Through the Curtain of Night / 2018
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.
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The warmth that slid across / 2017
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.
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Flowing / 2017
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.
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White Glove / 2017
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.
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Unreachable / 2015
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.
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Black Star and Still Corner / 2012-2016
These two paintings represent different states in Sarah Lai’s practice, both share her signature pale palette and a particular stillness imbued with material memories.
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