The artist has developed an uncanny visual vocabulary, populated by striking figures

Ysabelle Cheung

Bodies that stand: inside the world of Firenze Lai

A few years ago, 
	Firenze Lai told me that she does not make portraits. ‘I’m not painting from people,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to depict how one adapts to their environment and how that environment shapes you mentally and physically.’


	Environment played a major role in the artist’s childhood. Born in 1984, Lai grew up in a family of six on a public housing estate on Tsing Yi, one of Hong Kong’s outlying islands. With her three sisters, she roamed the bridges and highways that interlocked the islands of the New Territories – a network not unlike the corridors and stairways of the building in which they lived. At night her mother would return home from working at a specialty snake soup restaurant, her hands puckered and weathered from long days spent lifting huge, heavy buckets and descaling, gutting, and deboning snake meat. This confluence of interior and exterior space, and how the body tells its own stories, would later take root in Lai’s works, laying the groundwork for the narratives on her canvases.

These days Lai works in a studio in the neighborhood of Kwai Chung, sandwiched between an industrial shipping port and a cluster of high-rise buildings. Publicly, the artist communicates little about her practice; the biographies that can be found online for her are brief. After graduating in painting from the Hong Kong Art School (HKAS) in 2006, she designed books, drew illustrations for newspapers and magazines, and opened a gallery with fellow HKAS graduate and artist Lulu Ngie. The gallery closed in 2009, and since 2011 Lai has painted full time, while remaining semi-active in design work and publishing. (In recent years, she has produced artist books for Lai Lon Hin and Chan Chui Hung.) Besides thinking of her paintings’ titles – a task she enjoys – Lai prefers not to include too much about their context, allowing viewers to interpret the scenes for themselves instead.


	This economy with verbal description mirrors the artist’s approach to bodies: Lai paints kinesic movement, noting how our bodies react in crisis or moments of intense joy. In her oil paintings, sketches, and copperplate etchings, figures squeeze, press, lean, fall, collapse, dance, and cry. They are tent-like, with limbs running large and sturdy down from tiny, egg-sized heads. These distinctive proportions are deliberate; the viewer feels as if they are closer to the ground than usual, temporarily seeing the world from a child’s perspective or from a small, enclosed space. The framing emphasizes certain gestures: Interlocked hands and feet occur often, as well as seated, bending, or leaning figures in public areas, illuminating a basic human need for support and propensity for adaptation. ‘For the sake of survival, we have constantly had to balance our mind and body, just like plants tilting toward the sun,’ she said in an interview for her 2014 book Phototropism.

This balancing act can reveal tensions. For example, in the painting This is Not Yours (2014), a throng of people threateningly approach a tree that is being protected by a two-headed figure. The first head and its upper body face the crowd directly, while the other embraces the tree, marking the psychological fragmentation that can occur during an attack. This work, along with Human Chain (2014), which features a line of people with linked arms, introduced Para Site’s 2015 exhibition ‘A Hundred Years of Shame – Songs of Resistance and Scenarios for Chinese Nations’, making an effective comment on the vulnerability of borders and space.


	Conversely, Lai is also interested in how we use space to prop ourselves up. One source that continually fascinates her is the architecture of communal environments – her studio is filled with vintage desks, benches, and chairs from long-gone offices, and the books she reads include sculptor Francis Cape’s We Sit Together: Utopian Benches from the Shakers to the Separatists of Zoar. ‘The benches, as shared seating, represent community,’ its introduction explains. ‘As examples of craftsmanship, they propose a reconsideration of value.’

In Lai’s paintings, we often see examples of shared seating in the form of benches found in cultural institutions or for public transportation (Hurry Home, 2012; The Cinema, 2013; The Museum, 2012), or, less conventionally, the low, tiled walls that are dotted around Hong Kong and regularly used as unofficial rest areas (Betting Station, 2013; Autism, 2013; Weight, 2013; Ripple, 2015;&nbsp;Long Table, 2017). Lai’s works have lately also transformed into objects of support and community. In recent paintings and drawings, multiple figures appear, sometimes holding hands, as in Strangers (2019) and Somewhere Out There (2018), or merely inhabiting the same space – whether physical or psychological, as in collective social experiences – like in High Up and Above (2018).

	In December 2020, Lai posted a draft of a new work, Wave Machine (2020), on her Facebook wall, noting that she’d recently had difficulty painting. Yet, she wrote, these unfinished forms of things – ‘cracked, struggling, and full of sorrow and love’ – accurately evoke the shattered environment of the pandemic year as well as current, global sociopolitical conditions. Earlier that year, she had finished a copperplate etching depicting a figure pressing into a natural rock formation. Their arms are straight, as if indicating an extreme amount of tension, the hands bent fully at the wrist. A small head pushes deep into the rock surface. The work appears to be a scene of a lone figure trying their best to stay upright against adverse conditions. But Lai also leaves room for hope, in the form of balance – the figure in the etching, after all, is still standing.

Firenze Lai is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1458/Vitamin-Creative-Space">Vitamin Creative Space</a>.

<div>
	Ysabelle Cheung is a writer and editor based in Hong Kong.&nbsp;Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Artforum, ArtReview, Frieze, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Literary Hub, among other publications.
	Top image: Detail of a work by Firenze Lai, presented at Art Basel Hong Kong 2021 by Vitamin Creative Space. Please note that a dark filter has been laid over the image. The original photograph can be seen in the carousel above.&nbsp;</div>

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