Phillip Lai: In the Half Life

This is the first solo exhibition in Asia of Phillip Lai (b. 1969 Malaysia/UK). On the occasion he presents a group of new works whose gestures are abstractly contained whilst also immediately assimilated via a highly familiar lexicon of the daily. The imprint of domesticity, public environments and the industrial are variously present both in the shape the work takes as well as its surfaces and how the materials have been handled. In some cases the clear presence of the manual prompts an exaggerated visual experience of them, and in others it is conversely the apparent removal of the hand that does this. In more of an overview we might see, in every instance of these embodied forms, the interlocking relationship that we have with the material world that we inhabit and that we have designed. The works isolate, distort and probe this relationship.

Phillip Lai’s (b. 1969, Malaysia / UK) solo exhibition at Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong presents a series of recent works across various media. The show aims at drawing the viewers toward Lai’s intrinsic practice that often times implicates the notion of getting to the heart of the object: what it is, how it is created, how it is perceived, what kind of value we’ve been tuned to assign to it.