Lai Chongcheng: Classical Experience as Concept
Text / Qian Wenda
Lai Chongcheng’s paintings respond to a certain pressing need of our time: the need to revisit the historical experience of painting. In the act of re-presenting history lies an inevitable confrontation with the incompleteness of contemporary experience, alongside an effort to identify, recalibrate, and reproduce the shared experience of painting.
For Lai, the classical is not simply a matter of imitation or nostalgia. It is a way of re-entering history in order to apprehend the contemporary anew, in a manner that is at once more mysterious and more immediate.
The key to viewing Lai’s paintings today, therefore, lies in recognising a particular relationship between universality and difference. Universality resides in the enduring understanding of pictorial language that runs throughout the history of painting: the formal structures and underlying principles that persist across the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, Impressionism, Modernism, Postmodernism, and contemporary painting. Difference, meanwhile, emerges from the subtle distinctions between Lai’s practice and Renaissance painting, particularly the historical works that serve as evident points of reference in his compositions. Understanding these distinctions allows us to discern the crucial difference between classical experience and a conceptual engagement with the classical, and thus to recognise the significant position occupied by this conceptual classical experience within the contemporary system of painting.
The Classical as Mirror and Parallel of Contemporary Experience
The classical functions as a conceptualised mode of engaging with historical texts, rather than as the sole foundation of artistic practice. It gives rise to a new kind of contemporary experience: the possibility of openly expressing fascination with, and learning from, the past, while allowing the self of the present and future to appear, almost nakedly, within the field of vision of the past.
This gesture is at once direct and paradoxical. Our confidence in understanding the present and the future necessarily unfolds within the historical life of the classical. The classical, transformed into a concrete conceptual object, becomes an integral element of contemporary experience itself. In Lai’s paintings, seemingly distant classical texts serve as a vital source of energy, enabling him to cultivate a sense of reality, estrangement, and mystery that belongs unmistakably to the present.
“Fragments drawn from mythology, folklore, literature, or history continue to linger after I have read them. They gradually intersect with my lived experience, settle into memory, and form phrases like fragments of an inner murmur, eventually transforming into images at a particular moment.”
The Great Flood in the biblical narratives, the construction of the Tower of Babel, the elements of the Garden of Eden, the Temptation of Saint Anthony, the honest woodcutter of the fable, and figures from ancient Greek mythology such as Narcissus and Daphne: these narrative texts, belonging to the Western classical tradition, are absorbed in Lai’s mind and transformed into visual networks shaped by multiple modes of linguistic and pictorial training. They are then reproduced as a shared, mirror-like universe. Within this universe, traditional Western narratives become part of Lai’s personal consciousness and, in turn, evolve into painting as an autonomous experience.
What is particularly intriguing is that when a contemporary Chinese artist insists on returning to the classical through the medium of oil painting, the rupture and strangeness inherent in this cultural and historical position give rise to something resembling a performance-art-like wandering. Through the most circuitous paths and the most contradictory conditions, he responds to the fractures and absurdities of contemporary experience itself.
Painting thus redefines artistic radicalism through the most traditional of means. What matters is not an obvious retreat into the past, but the precision with which distance from the contemporary landscape is calibrated through this backward movement, allowing the present to be represented with greater depth. Especially in an era when AI tools are becoming widely adopted, the rigorous forms associated with an overriding pursuit of efficiency coexist within this smooth, profound pictorial space with the subtly intuitive intelligence of work done by hand. The hopes and impasses of contemporary life unfold within it alike.
“I have always insisted on working in the traditional manner of oil painting. This slow, repetitive technique is not merely a visual language; it is more like a way of thinking.”
Like the recurring figure of the “hermit” in his paintings, the classical becomes an expression of solitary intellectual independence, confronting the contemporary world with the utmost visual clarity.
Night, Fable, and Theatre
Night provides the visual ground from which the spiritual and the mysterious emerge in Lai’s paintings; fable, as a form of narrative symbolism, throws into relief the absurdity and alienation of the collective human condition in contemporary experience; and theatre constitutes the spatial structure of his paintings, allowing spatial relationships within the image to correspond to the shifting boundaries between truth and falsehood, reality and illusion in lived experience.
From this perspective, I can understand why Lai feels such a profound affinity with The Monk by the Sea, painted by Caspar David Friedrich in the early nineteenth century. The vast sky, sea, and land envelop and engulf the tiny human figure. Through the extreme disparity of scale between nature and humanity, an overwhelming visual energy emerges, one that seems to transcend the human condition. The painting’s meticulously composed structure and tonal treatment embody the mysterious and symbolic qualities that Lai has long admired.
A similar sensibility can be found in Goya’s late, expressionistic works and his series of etchings exploring dark themes. Lai is deeply drawn to these works’ exploration of the textures of humanity’s hidden experiences. This affinity explains why he is so captivated by night, whether approached through the history of art or the history of literature.
As a ground charged with unfamiliar associations, night contains an inexhaustible interweaving of emotions and states of consciousness. In most of Lai’s paintings, it appears as an atmosphere of profound stillness and subdued darkness, recalling, in this respect, his engagement with the visual characteristics of Baroque painting. From this atmosphere emerge complex states of thought and feeling; night need not necessarily refer to darkness as a literal feature of the depicted landscape.
The serene stillness of the figures in Nightfall Epistle and The Sleeping Woman brings to mind Georges de La Tour’s The
Penitent Magdalene. In the darkness of night, the figures enter a state of peaceful repose; even when silently awake, they seem suspended in an eternal sleep. De La Tour’s painting emerges from a meditation poised between faith and the earthly world. Lai’s works, by contrast, draw our attention to a mysterious condition that remains forever beyond our reach. This condition concerns such paradoxical qualities as tender language, distant proximity, steadfast time, and an affirmative form of nothingness.
The momentary contradictions, speechlessness, and pallor of human existence make every lie appear more candid. This is an essential characteristic of the visual fables Lai constructs. He does not need to define or intervene in society directly; instead, he renders or rewrites it through absurdity.
This approach is evident in his recent Monkey Business series, in which a succession of fluid, interconnected, and absurd narrative structures unfolds. The traditional fable of the Tower of Babel is dismantled and reconfigured as a set of diagrams depicting the activities of ape-like figures, imbued with the sensibility of modern archaeological documentation. Sensuous mythological imagination coexists with a conceptualised scientific rationality. Even the multiple perspectives through which the narrative is viewed become part of a narrative process that the artist subjects to further deconstruction. Lai’s painting thus constitutes a theatrical experience that negotiates simultaneously with the external world, the past, and the present.
A Genealogy of Painterlines
To look closely at Lai Chongcheng’s paintings is to delve into the spatial dimension of painting’s own historical experience. His understanding of the genealogy of pictorial language is remarkably profound and comprehensive.
Lai draws with considerable precision on the painting of the Northern Renaissance and the broader Netherlandish tradition, particularly the works of Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, using them as formal points of departure for the development of his surreal visual language. He combines these references with the Renaissance understanding of pictorial precision embodied in the works of Giotto di Bondone, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, and Albrecht Dürer.
His paintings are therefore characterised by emphatic, carefully considered, and highly distilled contours, alongside stable and harmonious arrangements of colour fields. Perspective and flatness are held in equilibrium, achieving a delicate balance between the contingencies of the artist’s hand and the rational order of formal composition.
In The Honest Woodcutter I & II, painted in 2026, we can observe the increasing maturity of Lai’s visual language, as its Netherlandish sensibility develops further into an independent artistic idiom. A symbolic figure drawn from a universal fable is released from its conventional imaginary attributes and enters the self-contained formal universe constructed by the artist. In this respect, the figure recalls what might be understood, through Maurice Blanchot, as a substitute for the fragile narrative within the pictorial process. Against a pervasive darkness, silent and desolate, the delineation of details emits a restrained yet precise radiance. Every object occupying the perspectival space is structurally interlocked with the others, nested within an intricate order, until the entire composition becomes an integrated and self-sufficient work of painting.
Of course, the sources nourishing Lai’s pictorial language extend beyond this historical lineage. At the level of overall composition, his work also resonates with the abstract tensions of minimalist form. In The
Fates, a pair of paintings made in 2025, one work is larger in scale and rendered in warm tones, while the other is considerably smaller and cooler in palette. Both depict outdoor scenes viewed from a windowsill. Their pronounced geometric divisions of space evoke the formal rhythms of Piet Cornelis Mondrian and Mark Rothko. Figurative landscapes and purified abstract forms dissolve into one another, and it is through their reciprocal formal contrasts that the works attain their full vitality.
At the most fundamental level of brushwork and structural organisation, however, Lai continues to work within the pictorial territory established by Cézanne, particularly in his most elusive treatments of pictorial structure. There, every seemingly spontaneous gesture contributes to something universal, enduring, and immutable, even when concealed beneath surreal narratives or fantastical imagery.
It is through this entire genealogy of experience that Lai’s engagement with the classical acquires such solidity and conviction, while continuing to reach toward the distance.
策展人手札
文/周颖
“夜晚来信”始终指向一种悬坠的美学，正如《下坠的想象》Ⅰ和Ⅱ中的鸽子和苹果。预感以一种正负差的形式镶嵌在皓月当空的星夜当中：通过“不可见对可见的包裹”，事物的隐匿与显现，正在光明与黑暗的相互渗透中交织（Chiasm），逐渐逼近、并降落在观众们的瞳孔当中。
本次展览呈现了包括新作在内的，赖崇铖过去三个项目中的20件作品。「逸散」与「重塑」编织合流成“消融”的线索。蛇、苹果、海螺，这些经典的艺术史元素，被剥离其文本原典（如伊甸园叙事），转而以“独立的形态”介入画面：树杈般的蛇形蜿蜒于植物根系间，海螺的分形旋转结构破碎为色块的蔓延和雪峰的崎岖，伊卡洛斯的羽翼定格在圣母蓝绸缎的虚空轮廓中。此般消解并非对经典的误读，而是将艺术史的记忆重构为“预感”的养料，并在画面中不断振荡和回想。
画面的元素也在“消融”的想象中坠入现实。人物形象退隐于动物和静物、并在植物的包围中，喻体逐步升格为预感的灵媒：掉色的蛇蜕、燃烧的树木、裂变的海螺，分别为“流转和消融”的方向提供了新的指引。从《圣安东尼奥的诱惑》中人与螺的实体相交，到《隐士屋》中依稀可辨的脚印所暗示下的螺屋功用，“北方文艺复兴”那通过修饰细节叩问真相的传统，正在崇铖的画中以新的形式重生。梅洛旁蒂在知觉现象学中提及“夜剥夺了视觉的主导，从而迫使身体转向触觉听觉等更原始的感知方式”。从“双夜”到“夜晚来信”，赖崇铖持续着对夜的叩问，“夜”的强辩解释了艺术家毅然转身古典技法的冗长和复杂。其原因不仅仅是爱好层面对艺术史的消化与反刍，更是一种对当下“肉身化场域在赛博时代消失”的抵抗。提白罩染的古典画法就像从夜的虚空中探囊取物，更加依赖直觉和间接的感受，主教红和圣母蓝为何贴切？或许在艺术史的旧夜或原始汤里，这种选择无关怀旧，而是对绘画本体论式的回溯：绘画原本的意义本就生于颜料的物性，而非观念的附加。神圣与威严的蓝与红，天与血，本就留存在直觉的黑暗里。
“夜”在崇铖的创作中是主题，或许也是方法论。赖崇铖创作的早期，在对“古典题材”求索中提炼出了自身绘画的“文学性课题”，通过对具体的形象和典故的引用和拓展，建立了一套提问式的观看方式。如果说彼时的崇铖还在经典形象和具体典故所带来的象征遗产中徘徊的话，那么新作中，“对称分裂”、“内外嵌套”、“正负空间”、“形象同构”等，给绘画形式、绘画技法、语言话题的发展已然内化到了其“提问式观看”的内部。某种意义上，“夜”作为主题亦作为方法，也自然对照着崇铖一直以来绘进化的内在性、间接性和暧昧的可读性上。譬如作为展览主题来源的单作《夜晚来信》，以小见大般嵌套式的阅读或许可以解释“信”的引申义：无字信笺与月亮场景的互文，映照着的一种当代的存在主义困境：信息的过剩与意义的真空正在制造一种“给予却无内容”的状态。我们似乎无法在电子色的余晖中安睡，而失眠和彻夜的狂欢正替代性的休克“美的神经”。此时罩染技法的写实同构于写意，信纸的褶皱、光晕的氤氲，山与浪的渐变、在名为写实的诗意中，皆成“预感”的物质性显影。
《塔》、《灵感与作家》、《悲伤的猴子》分别对照着赖崇铖早期创作中：物、人、动物等形象能指，三种元素的存在设定了一种“多维”的观看锚点。它们的意义并不仅仅止语在其形象本身背后的意义，而是在“消融”的过程里逐渐丰满。例如“塔”中了一种观看的尺度造成的模糊叙事：远看是密布在塔周围的云团，随着观众视线的逼近而显形为鸽子，让人自然的带入观看距离制造的视觉动线中，形成新的阅读阶梯。而“灵感与作家”作为沿用多次的题目，联系着旧作和新作中的叙事维度的变化：从“与灵感元素共生于画面中的作家”，到“与其他展览作品相互文的作家”。绘画的叙事从单幅画面里溢出至展览甚至阶段性创作的群体，话题的复调交响在延绵的话题和想象中。再回看“悲伤的猴子”：彼时赖崇铖画面中的动物作为人的“寓言镜像”、衬托出人物形象所无法言明的心理特质。随后的伊卡洛斯组画则在此基础上用物象的形态流变概括了动物：圣母蓝绸缎所构成的鸟翼，发展了动物作为言说主体的作用，把仅仅作为镜像的动物形象上升为预兆的轮廓。
“面庞若辩的僧侣如游魂般在海边踌躇，摇曳远帆般的激浪和嶙峋的岸礁相互张望，暗幕低垂掩藏着身后的风暴从天际线蔓延至天空的咽喉，几乎要吞没僧侣本就微小的身影。而恰在风暴的浓密处，一抹晴空拨云而来按停了即将凝固的至暗。”
值得一提的是，备展期间崇铖曾多次聊到弗里德里希的《海边僧侣》，这件近200年前的佳作用近乎静默的精准，描绘着自然的威严与美丽，用风暴将至的预感提醒一种危险，回应和震慑着彼时工业革命初期人类试图征服自然的张狂。“夜晚来信”像是对这种预感的延展，试图在过速的当下时空中用温柔和骇然提醒我们谦卑。“信”好似悬在空中那巨大的满月，令人心慌不安的同时也照亮了被涨潮冲回的漂流瓶。给予我们凝视，同时也给予我们慰藉。