Phillip Lai, Camden Arts Centre

Malaysian-born artist Phillip Lai – a long-standing Frieze London favourite – has produced a set of new sculptural commissions for the Gallery 3 space at the Camden Arts Centre. This series draws on ideas explored in his solo show last year at Fitzroy Square’s Stuart Shake/Modern Art gallery, which looked at the notion of objects as 'performative' entities. 

In Lai’s work, found and familiar items such as newspapers, cloth, cardboard, scaffolding, string, and shoes are arranged with minimal intervention on the part of the artist, and left to lean against each other an often precarious manner that suggests suspended narratives and unresolved tensions. Suspense, or suspension, is also the basis of the physical structures holding many of his pieces up. Objects are hung, strung and balanced on one another in equal, reciprocal relationships of push and pull. 

Often Lai’s installations use this structural stylings to remark on the interdependence of human beings to secure necessities such as shelter, warmth, and clothing. And now, drawing on pots, pans and other everyday vessels, these new works branch out into ideas of belonging and containment. His work sees the humblest of materials transformed into the cornerstones of profound social analysis.

The idea of bare necessities also informs Lai’s working practice: his sculptures never contain a superfluous gesture. Lai's masterful accomplishment is his ability to retain a formal detachment in his treatment of at times very emotive subject matter, whilst at the same time avoiding formal detachment by embracing the familiar materiality of the everyday.