Tang Contemporary Art is proud to present Cai Lei’s solo exhibition "Constructing Void. Cai Lei is creating a bewildering perceptual experience, which he describes as an experience from the "friction between sculptural and painterly perception."

 

Gazing at his paintings, one can enter and enjoy this bewildering perception, whilst the vanishing point is initially fixed on the oeuvre, it slowly retreats, firsks, and eventually escapes from sight. As the eyesight is trying to fix its position within the painting, depth of field, light and shadow, distance, and size are all involved in perception, yet they do not lead to a definite space. That is an experience of the coexisting materiality and illusion.

 

This is a secretive pleasure. The vanishing point of space is like a cunning prey, luring the gaze to capture it. Every time the eye tries to affirm the depth and width of space, the vanishing point suddenly escapes, vanishing without a trace. An unfocused gaze darted across the canvas in search of clues. At that moment, it’s unclear who is the prey and who is the predator.

 

Cai Lei secretly rewrites the assured interrelation between perspective and images. For hundreds of years, this has been a system of exchange between gaze and psychological space, promising spatial stability and certainty through a powerful structure. Currently, this visual language serves as the material for Cai Lei’s work. The intricate perspective is like a cheque that cannot be cashed, as it cannot be comprehended by our brain. Instead, it is a newly launched visual bond that initiates a more complex and integrated perception.

 

Shifting between the practices of sculpture and painting, Cai Lei is acutely aware of both the power and the limitations of linear perspective. In a sense, the promise that perspective makes to the pictorial plane mirrors the promise that modernity makes to society: the recreation of subject, space, and time under powerful control. Concerning the vanishing point, sizes and distances of objects can be mathematically combined, forming universal formulas that provide spatial certainty and stability. Sequentially, everything becomes measurable, calculable, and controllable. Gazed upon under linear perspective, the object easily loses its subjectivity and is reduced to a mere object. The viewer’s gaze is also captivated by this invisible structure, awed by the power of perspective. With remarkable effectiveness, this visual formula remains widely used in contemporary painting.

 

After years of practice and exploration, Cai Lei’s investigation of his work has gone beyond the deduction of perspective. He aims to fold and stretch this perception, resolving doubts within the painting’s framework through the formation of sculptural perception. Subsequently, he effortlessly confronts the convention of image itself.

 

Employing colors restrainedly, Cai Lei is highly cautious with the use of colors and forms that might evoke specific meanings or associations. In both his sculptural and painterly works, the spaces he constructs possess the quality of a “spatial prototype”. He refers to this as an “Unfinished Home”, whilst it serves as a prototype for all spaces. He constructs space that exists in a state between enclosure and openness, embodying a marvelous possibility. Avoiding colors from interfering with perception, Cai Lei enables the materiality of the medium to actively involve in the perceptual process. Through this approach, a brand new visual experience and perceptual possibilities are constructed.

​

Cai Lei creates an illusion through the materiality of the medium. This illusion does not arise solely from vision but from the engagement of tactile perception and the influence of the dynamic process of visual and spatial understanding, as a kind of confusion and surprise emerging from uncertainty. Perhaps this is a perceptual prototype before vision and touch were separated, a perceptual process before the nascency of meaning, which is “Constructing Void”. “Constructing Void” is an eternal struggle concerning the movement of perception and the arrival of perception.

​

Cai Lei’s works require viewers to view them in motion. He incorporates the perceptual process into the artwork itself. Such bodily movement and the accumulated visual experience over time shape the unique dynamic spatial narrative of Cai Lei’s pieces.

​

Concrete is an intriguing material that requires curing in water to develop its character. Even after setting, concrete continues to transform—hardening or softening with environmental changes, a process invisible yet persistently occurring. Each of Cai Lei's sculptures exists in prolonged metamorphosis, mirroring the concrete city's eternal mutability. This reveals the temporal ambition behind his material choice: to breathe with this world until the city reverts to concrete. Thus, his works embody both primordial vitality and a sense of ruination. Concrete is both genesis and apocalypse of the city, the cornerstone and terminus of modern civilization. Time thus folds into a Möbius strip. While Cai Lei resists assigning meaning to individual works, his oeuvre collectively constructs an allegory of modern civilization.

​

Cai Lei also holds the ambition to create new symbols. In this exhibition, the golden sculpture, “Chair of Authority 20250606”, achieves the sublimity promised by visual language itself through its Gothic form. Yet, he deliberately used gold to inject infinite symbolic meaning and imagination, to the point of bursting the symbol itself—the precarious power of dazzling gold, dangerous and brilliant at once.

​

Although Cai Lei strives to strip away the social attributes in his work, he remains an artist concerned with power structures. None of the creations can escape their metaphorical potential. When the allure of meaning becomes irresistible, he surrenders the entire work to the system of signification. For now, he revels in the promises that symbols make to meaning. Perhaps one day, this system itself will become his language and material.

​

Cai Lei’s works continuously guide viewers to affirm reality and emptiness. He uses real perception as the material of illusion. This unique perceptual process forms an Escherian space. He allows people to experience consciousness in a new way through creating a physical yet visual illusion in perceptual experience. In the interplay of gaze and consciousness, we enter a labyrinth of perception.

​​