Whitestone Gallery Taipei is pleased to announce Cai Lei’s first solo exhibition in Taipei. This solo exhibition will also mark the debut of the artist’s more than 10 recent works created in 2018.

Cai Lei was born in 1983, now lives and works in Beijing. Cai Lei’s works explore the relationship between illusion and space. From his interest in planarity, he carves out an illusory conceptual space which oscillates between the second and third dimension for his creations. In his works 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.

The works of this exhibition present Cai Lei’s continuous exploration in aesthetics. Cai Lei's creation involves the idea of "ambiguity", or "polysemy", both in his choice of material and artistic concept. His works provide a truthful experience of a room’s interior space as the result of the visual illusion and the cement material itself. The work “23m2” aims to trick our visual perception through the theory of perspective by accurately fitting the 23m2 visual area into a 4m2 canvas, creating a juxtaposition of textual meaning and sensibility between spatiality and visual illusion.

Cai Lei's works highlight the scenery and presence of an interior space. As the compressed spatial volume of a single piece of work becomes associated with the exhibition room, its surface of optical layering seems to create another distinct field within the exhibition. With the clever combination of perspective and sculptural setting, the artist's psychological space is manifested in reality, allowing the viewer to enter the arena of his work, forming a contradictive but cognitive experience.

*Special thanks to the support from Tang Contemporary Art