text by Joyce Ho
In January 2014, a pianist took up residence in Room 1733 of the Parisian artists' village, Cité Internationale des Arts. In August of that same year, LAI Chih-sheng arrived to take up residence in the same building, next door, in Room 1734.
Separated as they were by only a thin wall, traces of that pianist's activities occupied every part of LAI Chih-sheng's life: bathing, practicing piano, cooking dinner, making love, opening the door, closing the door…initially a disruption, the artist soon became accustomed to this intrusive presence in his life. And while he accepted the situation, he also began to carefully avoid any possible contact with the occupant of Room 1733. He studied her habits and staggered his own activities to prevent face to face contact. When she opened the door to leave, it was LAI who closed the door.
Room 1734 ultimately became LAI's only work from his period in the artist's village in Paris. Exhibited in the work is LAI's room: some strips of white paper hanging from a slanting section of wall, a drinking glass that covers the drainage hole in his shower, a plastic-tiled floor polished to a smooth shine, the recorded sounds of his neighbor practicing piano, a blurry photo of the corner where the two rooms intersect, and a letter to the pianist written by LAI. What is on display here are the traces of LAI Chih-sheng's life in Paris—the snippets, the details of his life in Room 1734 reflect those daily encounters, which, in fact, did not actually exist. From the opening of the exhibition to its close, LAI chose not to be present, so as to fully realize his imagination of Room 1733, and the sense of distance he retained toward it.
If the actual Room 1734 represented something real, then what the artist's creation represents is routine, the routine that constantly hovers at the edges of our reality. The intent behind LAI's work is clear: to show the thin membrane that separates routine and reality, and, at the moment the two are deliberately severed by the artist, how reality is displaced, and how it pulls at routine as the two jostle against each other yet exist independently. Separated from another reality by a thin wall, the artist nevertheless examines the clues it reveals, the work routines, and his collisions with it, to build an imaginative picture of that reality. The distance created by that wall was what allowed the artist to preserve the essential autonomy of his subjective self. The encounters between his two subjects are not presented literally in LAI's work, but by means of the traces, the residual effects of their collision.
As suggested by "Scene," the title of LAI Chih-sheng's solo show at ESLITE GALLERY, what viewers are invited to confront is not reality itself, but the routine we so often overlook beyond the edges of our self-identified realities.
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