蔡琦：食迷
2026.10.03-2026.11.14
CURATOR QIAN WENDA
策展人 钱文达
The exhibition's Chinese title, Shi Mi (食迷), evokes the beguilement of food and derives from the chapter of the same name in the Huashu. Through a contemporary lens, Shi might also be read as a verb: to taste the human secrets concealed within food. The text points to the inextricable connections between food, desire, and the manifold dimensions of human experience. Its counterpart, the exhibition's other thematic reference - the Greek term xenia - evokes the cultural forms embodied in food throughout the history of Western experience. This is also what I perceive in Cai Qi's paintings: each depiction of food speaks directly to the artist's judgments, grounded in experience, about himself and the world as he understands it.
His recent work marks a shift in two respects. Stylistically, Cai Qi has returned the food he depicts to the textures and rhythms of reality itself, using delicate, smooth, crisp brushwork to explore every detail of these tangible things. At the same time, this change in technique and style signals a conceptual turn toward forms of narration more intrinsic to painting. The depicted objects enter the furthest depths of the medium, where, within an increasingly distilled formal context, the unspoken implications of painting's language are continually given fuller expression.
Through his dual exploration of food - in life and in painting - he comes to recognize his own specific desires and formal experience. In Cai Qi's work, identity emerges through painting's "cold" presentation and disclosure. His sensibility and private world remain concealed within formal restraint and order.
His sense of his place in the world, and of his relationship to it, thus takes shape through the layered deconstruction of food on the pictorial plane, within the abstract structural relationships that grow deep inside its figurative systems.
Part of his work is therefore "pure painting": the pure experience of brushwork rooted in representational depiction. Another part involves subconscious and diagrammatic painting. The explanatory drawings within the principal figurative framework - resembling a chef's recipe notes - offer a further interpretation of his existing painterly experience. They probe, or reconsider, the relationships between food and painting: illusion and reality, lightness and weight, smoothness and folds.
食迷，食之迷也，出自《化书·食迷》，或也可以按当代逻辑，食作为动词，去品尝食物之中所潜藏的人的隐秘。其内容提示出了食物、欲望以及人类经验万象之间的必然关联。而与之相对应的另一个展览主题希腊语“Xenia”则指涉着西方经验历史中食物所包含的文化形式。这也是我在蔡琦的绘画作品中所感的，一幅幅关于食物的画作，直指的是创作者对自身和这个他所理解的世界的经验判断。
其新近的创作，一方面，在风格上，蔡琦将所描画的餐食归于现实本身的质感和节奏，他用细腻、平滑、轻脆的笔触深入呈现这些现实之物的每一处细节。另一方面，这种画法和风格上的变化，也指向艺术家在观念上转向绘画更为自身内在的叙事言说，让所画之物走入绘画的极致纵深范畴，在更为纯化的形式语境里，绘画语言的“言外之意”不断得以充分释放。
在对食物的双重发掘中（生活和绘画上），体认自身的明确欲望与形式经验。在蔡琦的创作里，身份来源于绘画中的“冰冷”展示与揭露——他的感性与私密隐藏在形式上的克制与秩序之中。
他在这个世界上的位置感，或是与世界之间的关联，也便孕育在绘画平面中对食物的层次解构中，在食物具象的图示系统中所深度生长的抽象结构关系里。所以在他的作品里，一部分所展现的是“纯绘画”，是扎根于具象描绘中的纯然的笔触经验，另一部分则是潜意识绘画，以及图表绘画，那些在主体具象框架内进行的说明性描画（像是厨师的菜谱笔记），像是对其原本绘画经验的再度诠释，去揣度或者是重新对待食物与绘画之间的虚与实、轻与重、平滑与褶皱。
策展人：钱文达