Central H Queen’s｜Constructing Void

Description

Cai Lei creates a perplexing perceptual experience, which he describes as arising from the 'friction between sculptural and pictorial perception.'

When viewing his paintings, one enters and enjoys this perplexing perception — the vanishing point of space slowly recedes, jumps, and finally escapes the capture of sight. As the gaze attempts to orient itself within the painting, parameters such as depth, light and shadow, distance, and size contribute to the formation of perception, yet they do not lead to a confirmation of space, resulting in an experience where materiality and illusion coexist.

Cai Lei quietly rewrites the promises of perspective in paintings. This is originally a system of exchange between the gaze and psychological space that has operated for hundreds of years, offering a strong structural guarantee of stability and certainty to pictorial space. This linguistic structure has now become the material for Cai Lei's works. Our brains cannot cash the checks of perspective in Cai Lei's paintings but instead receive new visual bonds, leading to a more complex and fused perception.

After years of practice and exploration, Cai Lei's exploration of his works has gone beyond the extrapolation of perspective. He wants to fold and stretch this perception, using the formation process of sculptural perception to solve the questions in the painting framework. In doing so, he effortlessly confronts the image.

The experience of Cai Lei's works must be completed in motion. He incorporates the perceptual process as part of the work. This physical movement and the accumulation of visual experience over time constitute the unique dynamic spatial narrative of Cai Lei's works.

Cai Lei also has the ambition to create new symbols. The golden 'First Chair' in this exhibition visually acquires the sublimity promised by the linguistic form itself in its Gothic style, but he deliberately uses gold to inject infinite symbolic connotations and imagination until the symbol itself bursts — that dazzling yet precarious power, dangerous and brilliant.

Although Cai Lei tries to detach the social attributes from his works, he remains an artist concerned with power structures. No creation can escape its potential for metaphor.

Cai Lei's works constantly confirm the real and the void, using perceptual reality as the material for illusion. This unique perceptual process forms an impossible space in the sense of Escher. He allows people to experience consciousness in new ways, creating a perceptual experience that is both physical and visually illusory. In the process of mutual pursuit between gaze and consciousness, we enter a perceptual labyrinth.