Firenze Lai North and True North

The work of Firenze Lai (b. 1984, Hong Kong) explores the social, political and spatial subtexts that shape individual and collective psyches across both physical and virtual worlds. Bringing together a new series of paintings and works on paper made in her London studio, ‘North and True North’ is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK. The figures that populate Lai’s canvases are often anonymous – sometimes even faceless – and situated within indeterminate environments that speak to the formless expanses of online existence. These bodies appear to merge with themselves or one another, become absorbed into larger systems or circuits, fragment, duplicate and drift between realms. Eschewing individual facial expressions in favour of symbolic, recognisable gestures, Lai seeks to understand her subjects’ realities through posture and movement, tracing how body language continually evolves in relation to how we live.