CAI LEI
b.1983 Changchun, China
Cai Lei’s works explore the relationship between illusion and space. From his interest in planarity, he carves out an illusory conceptual space that oscillates between his creations' second and third dimensions. Working in both painting and mixed media sculptural relief, light plays an important factor in enhancing this illusion of depth. Painted spaces of interior hallways or corners simultaneously protrude and recede depending on the viewer’s experience of the work.
Cai Lei graduated in 2015 with a Master’s Degree in Sculpture at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. An award-winning young artist from the 80s generation. He has exhibited internationally including the Yangtze Art Museum (Chongqing), Foundation Taylor (Paris), Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), CAFA Museum (Beijing), Poly Art Museum (Beijing), Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art (USA), Today Art Museum (Beijing), and Museum of Contemporary Art Bonn (Germany).
Recent solo exhibitions include: “Invisible Spaces,” ICICLE Cultural Space, Paris (France, 2025) “Constructing Void,” Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong (China, 2025); “Space of Space,” ART Yang Yun, Shanghai, (China, 2024); “Supremacist Space”, Tang Contemporary Art, Seoul (Korea, 2022); “Metonymic Liminality,” Song Art Museum, Beijing, (China, 2021); “Intermediate Capacity,” Enclave Contemporary, Shenzhen, (China, 2021); “Block”, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (China, 2020); “23 Square Meters”, Whitestone Gallery, Taiwan, (China, 2018); “Échelle des plans”, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (China, 2016); “In Ambiguous Sight, Unaccompanied”, Tang Contemporary Art (Hong Kong SAR, 2016).
Recent Group exhibitions include: “Decade One: Chronolect,” Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong (China, 2025); “Web Of Being: The Living Network,” Tang Contemporary Art, (Singapore, 2025); The Armory Show, Javits Center, New York, (USA, 2025); Art Paris, Grand Palais, Paris (France, 2025); Art Genève, Palexpo, Genève (Switzerland, 2025); Art SG, Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Center, (Singapore, 2025 ); “Moments Are Momuments,” BY ART MATTERS, Hang Zhou (China, 2024); “Exposition d’art France-Chine,” Musée d'Art de l'institut des Beaux-Arts du Sichuan, Chongqing (China, 2024); “Golden,” Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing (China, 2024); “Limited Intentionality,” ShanghART, M50, Shanghai (China, 2024), ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, Shanghai Exhibition Center, Shanghai (China, 2023); Art Shenzhen, Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center, Shenzhen (China, 2023); Tokyo Gendai, PACIFICO Yokohama, Tokyo, (Japan, 2023); Taipei Dangdai Art and Ideas, Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, Taipei, (Taiwan, 2023); Art SG, Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Center (Singapore, 2023); The Beijing International Art Biennale, Beijing Exhibition Center, Beijing (China, 2022); Art Busan, BEXCO, Busan, (Korea, 2021); “Extended Theatre - Nanhai 1st Public Art Exhibition”, Nanhai Qiandeng Lake Park (China, 2020); “Roots of Clouds Adrift —Temporality: OCAT Nanjing Public Art Project”, OCAT Nanjing (China, 2019-2020); “Wall Space: As Defining Boundary of Modern Painting”, Phoenix Seewell International Art Center, Fuzhou (China, 2019); “Motif and material”, Tang Contemporary Art (Hong Kong SAR, 2017); “Among”, Museum of Contemporary Art Bonn, Bonn (Germany, 2015), etc.
Exhibitions
Cai Lei: Invisible Spaces
Cai Lei
Motif and Material 素-材
Group exhibition: Cai Lei, Shen Liang, Wang Jun, Wang Ningde, Yan Bing, Zang Kunkun
In Ambiguous Sight, Unaccompanied
Cai Lei
2.25 - 3.18, 2016
Hong Kong
Press / News
Art Asia Pacific
Up Close: Cai Lei’s Precarious Architectures
Since the early 2010s, Beijing-based artist Cai Lei has forged a practice that dissolves boundaries between sculpture, painting, and architecture. A graduate of the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts with a master’s degree in sculpture, he brings an architect’s precision to works that probe at how space is inhabited, measured, and inscribed in memory. Using cement, steel, and acrylic, Cai explores the slippage between vision and experience, as well as the material world and its phantom double. His use of trompe-l’œil—less deception than inquiry—tests the limits of sight itself, coaxing depth from flatness, solidity from air, while revealing the fragile contract between seeing and believing. His art inhabits that charged threshold where vision falters and perception begins.
Bao Dong | The Space Grammar
Cai Lei’s sculpture has always shown an interest in flatness, an interest whichsurpasses even his interest in volume and space. For instance, in earlier series such as Us and Them, what most attracts the audience’s attention is not the shape of the sculptures but the undulating textures of their surfaces. Cai Lei has turned texture into a language and developed it to its extreme, as seen in the cracks and wrinkles in his portrayal of elderly people and his use of richly textured leather.
Texture is tactile. In art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s classification of forms of artistic vision, the tactile has itsorigins in sculpture, because when people view sculptures, they are using their eyes to “caress” and “touch” the undulating volume and folded space of the shape. When this tactile aspect is consciously grasped, itdevelops into a respect for materiality, and so modern sculpture no longer seeks to cover the texture of thematerials, and in fact even purposefully highlights it.