Published to coincide with Firenze Lai’s debut exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard (13 October – 14 November 2026), Survival Coordinates showcases the artist’s recent work in lavish detail. Across a suite of oil paintings and works on paper, Lai interrogates the distortion of reality, depicting charged atmospheres in which anonymous figures fragment and dissolve into swathes of muted greys, purples and reds. Throughout her practice, Lai explores the social, political and spatial subtexts that shape individual and collective psyches, across both physical and virtual worlds.

Interwoven throughout the publication is a comprehensive interview with Lai, conducted by art writer and theorist Isabelle Graw. Together they discuss how spatial and digital realities configure the body, alongside the impact of technological advancements and the instability of sociopolitical structures. In the conversation, Graw contextualises Lai’s practice within a somatic and philosophical framework which draws upon ideas of identity, formlessness and Aby Warburg’s concept of pathosformel – the artistic language of gesture depicted in Western painting.

Edited and co-ordinated by Elaine ML Tam and Miranda Yates
Designed by Guillaume Chuard (Studio Ardworks)
Text by Isabelle Graw and Firenze Lai
Printed by Grafiche Veneziane, Italy
240 mm x 170 mm, hardback
112 pages, colour illustrations throughout
ISBN 978-1-910844-85-4
Published by White Cube, October 2026

Isabelle Graw is a professor of art history and art theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She founded Texte zur Kunst in 1990 with Stefan Germer and has co-edited and conceptualised 141 issues so far. In 2003 she co-founded the Institut für Kunstkritik at the Städelschule with Daniel Birnbaum. Graw’s current research areas include: the value of art; friendship in dark times; judgment and value-creation under new forms of capitalism; and trace and agency in painting.