Lai was born in Hong Kong in 1984, where she lived and worked for many years before moving to London in 2022. Growing up in a densely populated metropolis, stark contrasts, political shifts and a frenetic cityscape were formative in the development of Lai’s artistic practice, and are responsible, in part, for her preoccupation with physical and psychical space. Upon completing her studies at the Hong Kong Art School in 2006, she worked by day and used snatches of time in the middle of the night to paint. This early commitment to a painting practice, whose realisation could only take place during the hours typically reserved for sleep, informed the artist’s early forays into the subject and content of the unconscious. It was not until 2011 that Lai began painting full-time, and even then, only on the domestic scale befitting a modest studio in one of Hong Kong’s many high-rises. Of the works produced in this period, many draw inspiration from the restless, labyrinthine cityscape of Hong Kong, and the way its architecture determines navigation through public space.
Lai’s paintings eschew formal categorisation or canonical comparison. Her artistic interests traverse time and region – among them, the esotericism of William Blake; the portraiture of Anthony van Dyck; the frenetic brushstrokes and smears of Francis Bacon. While humanoid figures appear in paintings, it is the self – in its individual or collective conception – that is her concern. Although the enigmatic, non-place settings of her paintings open a space for personal projection, the very anonymity of the figures infers ubiquity and commonality: ‘Each figure that I paint is the same person […] It is you and I.’ The internal contradiction of Lai’s outlook is conveyed in the ambivalence pervading much of her work, as well as her nuanced treatment of basic concepts that are often posed in opposition – that of public and private, self and other, single person and group. ‘The uniqueness we all think we have is something very collective’, Lai attests.
The scenes of Lai’s paintings draw forth social complexity and liminality, offering varied entry points into how the individual and the collective mutually constitute each other. Red Curtain (2018), for example, is compositionally divided by the presence of a red curtain or banner into which a solitary figure leans. Political in undertone, the painting appears to speak to an individual’s relationship with a national, collective identity. Night Walk (2023), conversely, features a migrating band or marching procession headed towards an unknown destination under the cloak of night. Denoted by a flurry of brushstrokes, the group’s movements take on the form of one amorphous mass, with each figure having forfeited its singularity for participation in the group. The movement, posture and unusual proportions of the Lai’s figures act as metaphors or ciphers for states and conditions, be it discomfit or agitation. Artwork titles, meanwhile, are ‘like passing a note to the viewer’ – a covert pact. In such works, the genericism of the figure behaves as an ‘everyman’, engaging notions of the proxy and its role in both representational painting and political media. That there are no identifying markers attributed to any of the persons depicted in Lai’s paintings allows her to address a universality of experience, an inter-psychical realm or commons. Like this, the artist distils the tenets of figurative painting to the subtlest of suggestions, to foreground relations and leave opportunity for interpretation.
Employing a visual language often associated with the territory of the unconscious, the artist uses a pared back palette and expressive brushwork to transform people and places into shapeshifters and phantasms. ‘What is space to the figures inside the frame,’ she asks. ‘How does a character adjust his mind and body to adapt to the circumstances he finds himself in?’ Warm, fleshy hues balk under the oppression of the dark colours that surround them, while figures risk or resist being overtaken by cavernous voids. The open landscapes of her paintings are spaces of movement and transition scarcely held in place, if not for a horizon line anchoring sky and ground. Others make use of rudimentary blocks of muted colour and simple lines to sketch out a room; in works like Information Center (2018), sections of tonally diverse paint divide up the canvas, such that the planes of the ‘room’ become unmoored. Elsewhere, the artist draws inspiration from the trompe-l’œil textures adorning the interiors of Italian churches, and has incorporated areas of marbled paint – small regions of mazy, vein-like patterning that allude to the presence of wider systems or networks. Lai’s works on paper similarly occupy a dreamlike space; making use of the inherent qualities of watercolour washes and coarse, sketchy graphite, these further her enquiries into the unconscious self, allowing for a certain spontaneity and speed of execution.
Lai’s explorations of non-physical space and virtual realms extend from the arena of the unconscious into that of contemporary life and its entanglement with the digital. In The True North (2024), for example, a chalky white figure is depicted hunched over on the ground, attempting to swivel itself by one disproportionately large hand – a recognisable gesture used to rotate a smartphone map. The painting’s title considers the idea of a ‘true north’, a term that refers to one of the Earth’s four cardinal axes; read with the assistance of a compass, a sense of ‘true north’ helps those that are lost to regain their orientation. A meditation on displacement, diasporic experience and the digital age, The True North also reflects upon belonging, divisive misinformation and the impossibility of determining a singular source of truth. Fittingly, for Lai, painting also functions as a ‘navigational’ operation, one that allows the artist to locate and express herself in a rapidly changing, contradictory world.
Lai’s illusory figures become stand-ins for psychological exploration. Stripping her subjects of their individuality, Lai’s paintings instead accentuate the often hidden, essential dynamics that comprise the relationship between mind, body and environment. Hers is a fundamentally generous mode of painting – one that allows viewers to intimately consider otherwise ephemeral situations and circumstances, yet rendered in a visual language devoid of overly prescriptive direction. By privileging the anonymity of subject and the autonomy of the self, Lai’s painting commands a site for convening, a shared set of social conditions.
Firenze Lai (b. 1984, Hong Kong) lives and works in London. She studied at the Hong Kong Art School from 2004 to 2006. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at PRÉCÉDÉÉ, Hong Kong (2021); MAMC+, Saint-Étienne, France (2019); Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, China (2015); and Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong (2014). Lai’s work has been featured in group exhibitions including M+, Hong Kong (2024); Centre Pompidou Málaga, Andalusia, Spain (2023); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2022); Kadist, San Francisco, California (2020); BWA Wrocław, Poland (2020); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019); Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, China (2018); 57th Venice Biennale, Italy (2017); and New Museum, New York (2015).
