Art | Lai Sio Kit wants to portray ‘single moment’ in new exhibition
Lai Sio Kit
An exhibition by local artist Lai Sio Kit opened last night at Creative Macau – Center for Creative Industries. The exhibition, titled “At the Point of Time”, showcases seven themed pieces created by the artist over a three-
year period.
The paintings on display are markedly different from the artist’s most well-known artworks, which are famous for depicting aerial perspectives of plants, flowerpots and the roofs of buildings.
The exhibition that opened yesterday instead features abstract, pattern-based tile art. Variations on a simple design were copied by the artist on dozens of tiles and then arranged on eight-by-
eight grids.
The designs for six of the seven pieces are broadly similar. Each tile contains a black cross on a grey-white background with a brown circle acting as the central overlay and focus of attention.
“From time to time I cannot be satisfied with painting a single image. […] Living in a city, you are surrounded by artificial things, and time will leave marks,” noted the artist in a written text accompanying the exhibition. “I do not intend to portray a specific item but to present time itself.”
The seventh piece dominates the art gallery, embodying a similar principle but on an entirely different scale.
Standing more than two meters tall against the gallery’s back wall is a colossal green-tiled painting that slopes down toward the floor. Its sheer length, which leaves little excess room on the other side of the gallery, makes it unlikely that the artwork could be arranged any other way.
Practical concerns aside, onlookers yesterday were confident that there was an artistic reason behind the artwork’s elevation.
“For this special space I decided to elevate the piece in order to show it from a different perspective,” said Lai in his opening speech yesterday, possibly in response to this speculation. “A lot of people ask me what these works mean. In fact, I don’t have a lot to talk about [when it comes to] my work.”
“This work is to capture a specific moment that I see in the city,” he continued, “and this is the feeling I have when discussing that moment.”
For Lúcia Lemos, director and founder of Creative Macau, that moment is located some time in the 1960s.
“For me, this [reflects] the 1960s. I think the motifs in that decade were more simple and square-shaped,” she told the Times in an interview. “[The piece is] a kind of timeline, where the artist wants to [preserve] some memories of the past. It is like an outdoor pavement, sort of damaged by time.”
However, Lai says that he is not trying to capture a specific moment, but any single point in time.
“The moment [itself] is not very important,” he informed the Times. “It’s about the time. The painting does not look clean; it looks dirty. Natural spaces evolve by themselves, but cities are created by people. After a long time, they will become dirtier. I try to put a stop to time and paint a former [picture of the city].”
The piece remains untitled, the artist told the Times. He also withheld the mystery of the cause for its partial elevation.
“I am making a conversation with the area made available to me,” was the only clue offered.
The exhibition opened last night and will be showing at Creative Macau until August 22.
