Lai Chih-Sheng is a Taiwanese contemporary artist known for subtle, site-specific interventions that increase viewers' sensitivity to their environment, enabling new sensory experiences of space by reconfiguring the relationship between the body and its surroundings.
Read MoreAs well as attending art school in Taiwan, Lai Chih-Sheng was a professional bricklayer for 13 years, granting him a sensibility for engineering that extends throughout his practice. In the 1990s, he was a member of the conceptual art group National Oxygen, whose work involved site-specific installations in decrepit buildings on the outskirts of Taipei, including the stacking of 100 bricks inside an abandoned factory.
Lai's later work spans installation, sculpture, and drawing, balancing laborious preparation with minimal alteration to the original space or object. In Life-Size Drawing (2011), Lai meticulously traced the lines made by the architecture of an empty exhibition space. Barely perceptible, the outlines are vestiges of the artist's hand that reduce the artwork to an experience between the viewer and the space.
Lai Chih-Sheng's practice is grounded in the self-reflexivity endemic to the tradition of Conceptual art, in which the means of artistic production are transformed into the object of display. Works such as Drawing Paper (2012) are minimally altered from their original state, drawing viewers' attention to the literal supports for artistic practice.
Lai's Border (2013)—first presented in Instant at IT Park, Taipei (2013), and again at the 2015 Lyon Biennale and the 2016 Aichi Triennale—reflects the conditions of art-making. In it, viewers edge their way across a narrow, elevated pathway around the exhibition space's periphery, from which they look down onto the discarded materials of the exhibition's installers, emphasising the viewers' relationship to the production and consumption of art.
Lai's later site-specific works continue his preoccupation with heightening viewers' sensitivity to their surroundings. The platform of Canton Flower Bridge (2018), for example, extended from the walls of Observation Society, Guangzhou, placing viewers at a remove from which to observe the imperfect space. Stop By (2019) rerouted Edouard Malingue Gallery's rainwater drainage system through the exhibition space, exposing an essential infrastructural process usually hidden behind gallery walls.
Presented in 2020 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Closer is located on the museum's third floor, which looks onto the lobby below. The artist constructed two platforms connected by a series of runways that alternately raise and lower viewers around the parapet. The work's monochrome palette blends into the Modernist building so well 'that viewers might not even notice it', as described by Penny Liu for Ocula Magazine
As is the case with much of Lai Chih-Sheng's work, Closer is minimal, but its impact is large. By physically relocating its viewers, the work activates a space otherwise treated only as a thoroughfare, transcending visual and physical boundaries to grant a literally new perspective on the surrounding space.
Lai's work has been exhibited across China, Japan, England, and Europe. Major solo and group exhibitions include Linger, ALIEN Art Centre, Kaohsiung, Taiwan (2020); Besides, Kirishima Open Air Museum, Kagoshima (2019); Healthier, Simpler, Wiser, Edouard Malingue Gallery, Shanghai (2019); and Homo Faber: A Rainbow Caravan, Aichi Triennale, Nagoya City Art Museum (2016).
Alena Kavka | Ocula | 2021
