For the first art exhibition at the AFA in 2015, two artists are invited to show their works together. Both painters, Sylvie Lei and Lai Sio Kit were graduated from different art academies in Mainland China. Therefore carrying with their strong and solid technical skills in their artworks. Returning to Macao separately a few years ago, they have been working incessantly in their respective path as artists. Even though their works vary greatly in terms of styles, but their efforts are nonetheless comparable. Both of them play a central role in Macao’s contemporary art scene, their works shows an extraordinary strength that are remarkable.
In the current exhibition, both have presented brand new works. Coincidentally, they have both started their series of work from observations based in Macao.
Sylvie Lei has seen the casinos being built up into a new and colorful backdrop of Macao. So he has begun from the artificial colors, in order to explore the essence of light. If we traced back to its physical origin, the substance of light is an electromagnetic radiation that carries a particular frequency of wavelength. And different colors in turns carry their own particular frequencies as well. The human eyes can observe these various frequencies that form different rhythm of colors. The artist not only puts these colors onto the canvas, but also considers how to reveal their frequencies effectively. All these seemingly distinctive arrangements are actually of identical nature.
And Lai Sio Kit has got his inspiration from the impermanent nature of life. From yesterday’s Macao rooftop paintings to today’s traces on ceramic squares, the artist is exploring in the shape found in daily life so that to walk toward the essence of time. Time is the abstract concept of how the world is changing from one state to another. The artist experiences and visualizes the abstract concept through the act of painting. With his increasingly skillful painting technics, Lai Sio Kit creates these seemingly identical but in reality unique images that can never be repeated, so that to reveal the refined nature of time.
Sylvie and Sio Kit both have a simple but persistent attitude toward art. Their concerns are no other than the very essence of art and life. And they have both chosen the daily practice of painting as an investigation of their own thoughts. However, they have chosen the opposite directions of experiences.
“Light” and “Time” are two most intriguing topics in physics and well as in art. The collision takes place in the current exhibition and the heat generated has reached a critical point that transcends their current states of being. The sparks produced by their presence are subtle: Sylvie is using changing patterns and rhythm to depict the theory of indestructibility of all substance, while Sio Kit is using seemingly unchanging patterns to demonstrate the impermanence of reality. Through their paintings, the audience is bought into a meditative state of being. Between the “indestructible” and the “impermanent” their works are skillful competitions and their contrasts reflect upon one another at the same time. In this transition of the old and the new, we are ready to prepare for the coming lunar new year, in order to enter into the unknown.
“I bow down to the most sublime of speakers, the completely awakened one who taught contingency (no cessation, no birth, no annihilation, no permanence, no coming, no going, no difference, no identity) to ease fixations.”
-The Eight Negations of “The Middle Way” by Nagarjuna
Curator - Alice Kok
