SPENCER LAI - 'Modes'
Neon Parc South Yarra 8th June – 6th July 2024
This is the artist’s third show with the gallery in as many years, although the first at its South Yarra venue. It consists of fifteen works, twelve wall assemblages and two free-standing installations. Development in that time has been impressive and the current show offers greater focus, a more integrated approach to assemblage.
Installation view
The artist is best known for his identification with the LGBTQ cause and the work is usually interpreted as dealing with homosexual desire and sensibility. The uncredited catalogue notes to the show confirm this view. Yet while the artist clearly intends the work to be read in this way, whether those intentions are actually realised in the work is another matter. This review explores a broader reading.
‘Wish Fulfilment Jewel Borne Of Lotus Flower’ (2024) 90.5 X 100.5 X 3 cm Mixed media
Lai’s distinctive assemblages take the form of low or bas-reliefs, in which a shaped base is augmented with sundry tiny panels, often miniature sketches upon which summary distress has been visited in the form of punctures and scratches, these in turn decorated with cheap jewellery baubles and obscure mementoes, all this with nods to modish colour decor choices. The arrangements tend to be lateral rather than acquiring greater depth, or as a series of shallow compartments and announce essentially two features, the greatly reduced scale to components and an implicitly interior or indoor setting.
The works are firstly about a very strict ordering of collected objects, and in this sense are distant heirs to the ‘shadow boxes’ of Surrealist, Joseph Cornell. Elsewhere on an art history timeline, they might be seen as an extension to the ‘flatbed picture’ to borrow Leo Steinberg’s famous description of Robert Rauschenberg’s approach to assemblage. Then again, for a later generation of IKEA fans, a ‘flat pack’ might be more apposite.
‘Machine Seed’ (2024) 46 X 46 X 3 cm mixed media
Since the work deals in homosexual relations, this format may seem strangely oblique or painfully coy but part of the arrangement surely rests with the nature of an LGBTQ identity and its deep ambiguity and partly, with the artist’s generation. Lai (b.1991) belongs to the ‘digital natives’ – those that have grown up with an interactive web and ever-present ‘devices’ and upon which they place the greatest confidence and confidences. It is this dependence upon a vague, but vaguely reassuring framework and its endless appetite for content that slowly emerges from the work and in such a surprising and novel form it deserves wider recognition.
‘Arrival’ (2024) 62.5 X 62.5 cm pencil on paper with lacquered frame
The most telling feature in this regard is the rounded corners to frames. This is not a standard framing option but something distinctive and integral to the work. Conventionally, such corners are a design solution to handling or close contact for persons. They are a safety and efficiency measure, and that connotation is freighted into the work on a number of levels. The smooth black contours in works such as ‘Arrival’ (2024) practically scream mobile phone or tablet view and this allusion then modifies how content has been collected and represented. The reliance upon a web, a cloud and a disturbingly omniscient ether, frames a practice of minor and increasingly tentative and initial admissions. One excuses the other, the bigger the framework, the slighter the contribution. Thus the latitude allowed the mount here amplifies the diminished standing of the drawing. On this level the work is about finding and filling niches on one’s ‘homepage’ ‘newsfeed’ and ‘story’ and serves as an all-purpose confessional, just as social media do.
‘Modes’ (2024) 63 X 93.5 cm pencil drawings in lacquer frame
In 'Modes' (2024) tiny, painstakingly cautious sketches at most deliver a figure in repose, face averted, perhaps a nagging reminder of the need for further ‘life’ classes, but for the most part mark a retreat to schematic or diagrammatic depictions of a person or persons, open to much, as long as much remains undefined.
These miniature diagrams of LGBTQ practitioners also echo through to the shaped bases, where rounded corners are again prominent, urging comfort for those intimate moments and where slots and inserts to various sides take on a similarly schematic rendering of orifices and limbs, at least for the privileged or initiated. Such shapes also converge upon contemporary graphics, the compressions and ellipses to corporate logos in particular, and this is surely deliberate, a progression from the private and cursory to the public and polished, hinting at acceptance, support at a higher, discreet level.
‘Bloom – Incantation For New World’ (2024) 65.5 X 83.5 X 3 cm mixed-media
Even in the metal trays that contain or frame shaped bases we find these same rounded corners to the folded sides. The message, plainly, is one can never be too safe. The artist can dabble in countless sub-cultural asides within this, indulge a taste for cheesy poetry, assure us of his minority standing, without taking the trouble to properly inhabit any of it. This is one of the unfortunate consequences of the approach, indeed the generation; of the need to sample or compile overwhelming the need to compose.
‘New Season’ (2024) 46 X 46 X 3 cm mixed media
Another notable aspect of the work has been the rough and ready, conspicuously DIY approach to construction. At times the artist draws attention to components secured with screws and clamps, as in ‘This Morning...’ (2023) and while this gels with the overall slipshod nature of surrounding wobbly and not-quite-matching edges, it then jars with the elaborate and sophisticated choice of framing and materials. It is a troubling inconsistency; it may be a transitional work.
This Morning I Woke Up With The Scent Of A Verdant Wind And Flower In My Hair [Lotus Eaters By The Evening Fire]’ (2023-4) 90 X 60 X 8cm mixed-media
Obviously there are less visible means by which these parts may have been secured. Their use in the project as a whole at this point perhaps hints at an insistence, an anxiety about their inclusion, about ‘fitting in’, even in the most accommodating frameworks.
‘Psyche’ (2024)
The installations, 'Psyche' (2024) - created in collaboration with Alexis Kanatsiotis - and 'Untitled' (2023-4) obviously have no compelling link to cyber culture or a generation and are less distinctive, less effective for that. Indeed, efforts to summon a homoerotic ambience by summary furnishings risk humour when not pathos. The style choices never quite carry us to the childhood retreat or reversion described in the catalogue notes, nor the short accompanying video with its mix of IKEA showrooms and private, teasing texts. We have design before desire.
‘Untitled’ (2023-4)
In 'Untitled' (2023-4) the artists claim to evoke ‘the unbridled and provisional homosexual spirit of a space, tapping into the collective psyche of queer longing’. But what we actually have is a line drawing of a young man in averted profile on an irregular shaped red table top with an assortment of items facing it. Whether a queer encounter can be both unbridled and provisional of course begs the question, and then as to what counts as ‘queer’ on the LGBTQ spectrum. Again, any sense of an encounter is forestalled by the deliberate sexual ambiguity. We never really picture two men in either installation because the situation involves far more than props or plans, a handy device to share it on, and the appeal to decor to substantiate such an encounter is, as noted, frankly silly or sad.
The shortcomings of the installations however, only underline what is compelling about the wall assemblages. Lai finds subtle and surprising ways to refer to a practice of his time and that holds a global scope. Clearly there are many Gen Y artists that have not felt the need to direct their work to these ends, even though they almost certainly avail themselves of its advantages. Lai stands out not only for finding a way of pointing to this world and its essentially unitary or modular assembly. Actually, ‘Modules’ may have been a better title for the show, since the mode remains assemblage throughout.
The point is that while the subject of LGBTQ practices remains uncomfortable for the majority of the public and its art worlds, there is something undeniably original and absorbing in Lai's work.
Finally, Neon Parc is to be applauded for representing such an inventive and subtle artist. Local subsidised galleries such as ACCA and Buxton Contemporary dedicate themselves to the politically correct, favoured social profiles, yet it is a commercial gallery that demonstrates the keenest eye there, and dispels the myth that radical or avant-garde work needs institutional recognition.
IMAGES COURTESY OF NEON PARC
Thanks to Gallery Manager Emma Nixon for additional background
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