ARTIST 艺术家
EXHIBITION 展览
SUPPORT 支持
Xenia
Qian Wenda
Within my narrow and stereotyped understanding, the artistic profile of the post-2000 generation has yet to take shape—or, at least, in my view, it should not have taken shape just yet. I have an almost subconscious compulsion to insist on the accumulation of time and experience, particularly when it comes to painting as a medium. Yet meeting Cai Qi prompted me to begin reconsidering my understanding and perception of these young artists—or, from another perspective, perhaps those born in the 1990s are no longer young. At the very least, Cai Qi himself, his work at this stage of his practice, and his working methods have aroused my profound curiosity and anticipation.
There are many people in the art world who understand and appreciate food. For most, however, this appreciation comes with the accumulated experience of being over thirty—a kind of worldly sophistication that has developed into a somewhat jaded taste. Stories about particular restaurants or culinary experiences often serve merely as an opening for self-satisfied, uninterrupted conversation. The Cai Qi I know, by contrast, methodically weaves his research into and interest in food into his emotions, temperament, and sense of destiny. For him, painting food is not simply a way to convey the refinement and deliciousness of a dish. Rather, the objects he depicts reflect the clearest and fullest image of human sincerity.
Around his third year of undergraduate study, Cai Qi began making work with food as his subject. Initially, he did not choose to depict food directly in a realistic style. Perhaps out of excessive caution toward the act of creation, or perhaps because of his resistance to rigorous realism, he replaced the food on the tableware with objects modelled in LEGO. The reproducibility and industrial character of LEGO forms entered into an almost satirical opposition with people's instinctive emotional expectations of food.
In his recent work, Cai Qi has, on the one hand, brought the food he depicts closer to the textures and rhythms of reality itself. Through delicate, smooth, and crisp brushstrokes, he explores every detail of these real-world objects. On the other hand, this shift in technique and style also signals a conceptual turn toward a form of narrative expression more intrinsic to painting itself. The depicted objects are drawn into the furthest depths of painting, where, within an increasingly purified formal language, the unspoken meanings of painting are given ever greater scope to unfold.
Of course, Cai Qi is still developing. Just as he experiments with menus that bear his distinctive personal style, he also explores the materials available to him at this stage of his practice, bringing media with different textures and layers into the dimension of the painted surface. In doing so, he establishes a subtle correspondence and comparison between pictorial space and the material space of viewing.
One can discern the state of the artist at this particular moment, conveyed collectively across these works. Each painting therefore contains something the artist currently holds dear: an all-consuming pursuit of balance, precision, and perfection, alongside the pride, risk-taking, and mistakes indispensable to achieving it.
This curiosity and honesty, grounded in experience, matter more than a premature fluency of language driven by an overdetermined sense of purpose.
In my conversations with Cai Qi, he often brings up the question of “identity” in painting.
This is not identity in the usual social sense, nor is it the question of external, socially recognized identities. Rather, it concerns an extremely subtle dimension of inner identity, one that is easily overlooked: a trace of the self that extends from, and develops through, the authentic experiences of the subconscious.
Through his dual exploration of food—in life and in painting—Cai Qi comes to recognize his own desires and formal experiences with greater clarity. In his work, identity emerges through the “cold” presentation and revelation of painting itself. His sensibility and intimacy remain concealed within formal restraint and order.
His sense of his place in the world, and of his relationship to it, takes shape through the layered deconstruction of food across the pictorial surface, as well as through the abstract structural relationships that develop within the representational system of food imagery.
Part of his work therefore embodies “pure painting”: an unadulterated experience of brushwork rooted in representational depiction. Another part belongs to the realm of subconscious painting and diagrammatic painting—explanatory drawings contained within the framework of figurative subjects, resembling a chef’s recipe notes. These seem to reinterpret his original painting experience, probing or reconsidering the relationships between food and painting: the virtual and the real, the light and the heavy, the smooth and the wrinkled.
Here, identity is not a concept defined by a fixed marker. It is instead a process of readiness and fluency that unfolds through the concrete experience of painting.
In Cai Qi’s work, this reflection on relationships often takes the form of surreal humour. In Crab Treasure Instructions, for example, the explanatory drawings lay out the steps involved in preparing the dish, while speech bubbles allow the dish itself to “speak” from within the painting. In An Auspicious Day, a cake with candles, symbolizing the celebration of an important occasion, occupies the centre of the composition. The dates marked on a calendar appear as an overlapping image within another pictorial frame. These circled “auspicious days” establish a visual reconstruction of the relationship between words and things when juxtaposed with the cake and its candles. A faint arc of rainbow seems less to celebrate than to poke fun at a familiar experience shaped by consumerism. In Dusk, the vivid, fluorescent red of the fatty belly of a tuna glows against the backdrop of a city at twilight. A thumbs-up symbol, resembling an internet reaction emoji, unites external reality with the reality of sensation, precisely pulling and releasing our abstract perception of food between the visual and psychological registers.
Works such as Plating Exercises and Slices of Inspiration reveal a kind of structural politics. Through the seemingly static narrative language of everyday life, they describe a far broader and more complex world. Within these apparently microscopic universes of still life lie correspondences to the events, experiences, and underlying logic of life as a whole.
Cai Qi’s inquiry into identity thus encompasses experiences that are more composite, inward, and ongoing.
And so, although what I see before me are completed, static paintings, I can still perceive the dynamic processes unfolding within their canvases. Cai Qi appears within them as a living, multidimensional practitioner of his own life.
In my conversations with Cai Qi, I learned about the concept of Xenia. Western still-life painting can trace its origins to the xenia frescoes of ancient Greek and Roman art. In Greek, xenia refers to the hospitality a host extends to visitors from distant places, even to strangers. To demonstrate their hospitality, hosts would prepare abundant food for their guests. When these offerings were depicted in frescoes, the images came to be known as xenia—a precursor to what would later develop into still-life painting.
Although Cai Qi’s paintings may bring to mind the still lifes of the Dutch Golden Age, he is, in fact, opposed to the subjective intentions underlying those paintings. What he prefers—or, more precisely, hopes to achieve—is a pictorial quality characterized by objectivity, “coldness,” and a vast openness.
The concept of xenia, and the history of still life itself, therefore acquire a new range of meanings in Cai Qi’s current practice. Objects become points of departure, accommodating and releasing the composite, multivalent, and complex layers of contemporary experience, before ultimately returning to the simplicity of painting itself.
In Finish This Glass and Face the World with a Smile, the gaze focuses on a small detail of a drinking glass. With every brushstroke, Cai Qi renders the texture of the liquid with precision and ease. Although a small explanatory drawing remains in the lower-right corner of the painting, it gradually yields to the commanding formal presence of the composition as a whole. The intensity and purity of the painting’s overall language become its most compelling qualities. The restrained, inscrutable allure of its form takes the place of the layered tension generated by deconstructing the narrative, becoming instead a narrative dimension inherent in painting’s own language.
Of course, at this stage of his development, Cai Qi is already revealing a great deal of what he has been working toward: a young artist’s ordered and wholehearted devotion to painting, together with an unreserved disclosure of the threads of his own life, grounded in that devotion. Looking ahead, he will further distil a pictorial language uniquely his own.
I remember that whenever I visited his home for a meal, even the simplest everyday dishes offered me an inexhaustible sense of ritual from within. This is precisely the kind of ritual I cherish: I dislike pompous, ostentatious ceremony, and much prefer this intimate, understated kind. Cai Qi has a gift for allowing an exacting pursuit of perfection to permeate a quiet, relaxed rhythm, while offering in return the greatest virtues and honours.
His painting is much the same: gentle and smooth, generating a subtle energy from within a quiet, steady composure.
And so I believe that my curiosity about and anticipation for Cai Qi may be more than a simple intuition. They may also be the result of a careful and precise process of reasoning, grounded in both theory and experience. In this, I am confident.
Qian Wenda September 3, 2026
.
食迷
文/钱文达
Qian Wenda
Within my narrow and stereotyped understanding, the artistic profile of the post-2000 generation has yet to take shape—or, at least, in my view, it should not have taken shape just yet. I have an almost subconscious compulsion to insist on the accumulation of time and experience, particularly when it comes to painting as a medium. Yet meeting Cai Qi prompted me to begin reconsidering my understanding and perception of these young artists—or, from another perspective, perhaps those born in the 1990s are no longer young. At the very least, Cai Qi himself, his work at this stage of his practice, and his working methods have aroused my profound curiosity and anticipation.
Food as Subject: The Origins of Painting
There are many people in the art world who understand and appreciate food. For most, however, this appreciation comes with the accumulated experience of being over thirty—a kind of worldly sophistication that has developed into a somewhat jaded taste. Stories about particular restaurants or culinary experiences often serve merely as an opening for self-satisfied, uninterrupted conversation. The Cai Qi I know, by contrast, methodically weaves his research into and interest in food into his emotions, temperament, and sense of destiny. For him, painting food is not simply a way to convey the refinement and deliciousness of a dish. Rather, the objects he depicts reflect the clearest and fullest image of human sincerity.
Around his third year of undergraduate study, Cai Qi began making work with food as his subject. Initially, he did not choose to depict food directly in a realistic style. Perhaps out of excessive caution toward the act of creation, or perhaps because of his resistance to rigorous realism, he replaced the food on the tableware with objects modelled in LEGO. The reproducibility and industrial character of LEGO forms entered into an almost satirical opposition with people's instinctive emotional expectations of food.
In his recent work, Cai Qi has, on the one hand, brought the food he depicts closer to the textures and rhythms of reality itself. Through delicate, smooth, and crisp brushstrokes, he explores every detail of these real-world objects. On the other hand, this shift in technique and style also signals a conceptual turn toward a form of narrative expression more intrinsic to painting itself. The depicted objects are drawn into the furthest depths of painting, where, within an increasingly purified formal language, the unspoken meanings of painting are given ever greater scope to unfold.
Of course, Cai Qi is still developing. Just as he experiments with menus that bear his distinctive personal style, he also explores the materials available to him at this stage of his practice, bringing media with different textures and layers into the dimension of the painted surface. In doing so, he establishes a subtle correspondence and comparison between pictorial space and the material space of viewing.
One can discern the state of the artist at this particular moment, conveyed collectively across these works. Each painting therefore contains something the artist currently holds dear: an all-consuming pursuit of balance, precision, and perfection, alongside the pride, risk-taking, and mistakes indispensable to achieving it.
This curiosity and honesty, grounded in experience, matter more than a premature fluency of language driven by an overdetermined sense of purpose.
The Question of Inner Identity
In my conversations with Cai Qi, he often brings up the question of “identity” in painting.
This is not identity in the usual social sense, nor is it the question of external, socially recognized identities. Rather, it concerns an extremely subtle dimension of inner identity, one that is easily overlooked: a trace of the self that extends from, and develops through, the authentic experiences of the subconscious.
Through his dual exploration of food—in life and in painting—Cai Qi comes to recognize his own desires and formal experiences with greater clarity. In his work, identity emerges through the “cold” presentation and revelation of painting itself. His sensibility and intimacy remain concealed within formal restraint and order.
His sense of his place in the world, and of his relationship to it, takes shape through the layered deconstruction of food across the pictorial surface, as well as through the abstract structural relationships that develop within the representational system of food imagery.
Part of his work therefore embodies “pure painting”: an unadulterated experience of brushwork rooted in representational depiction. Another part belongs to the realm of subconscious painting and diagrammatic painting—explanatory drawings contained within the framework of figurative subjects, resembling a chef’s recipe notes. These seem to reinterpret his original painting experience, probing or reconsidering the relationships between food and painting: the virtual and the real, the light and the heavy, the smooth and the wrinkled.
Here, identity is not a concept defined by a fixed marker. It is instead a process of readiness and fluency that unfolds through the concrete experience of painting.
In Cai Qi’s work, this reflection on relationships often takes the form of surreal humour. In Crab Treasure Instructions, for example, the explanatory drawings lay out the steps involved in preparing the dish, while speech bubbles allow the dish itself to “speak” from within the painting. In An Auspicious Day, a cake with candles, symbolizing the celebration of an important occasion, occupies the centre of the composition. The dates marked on a calendar appear as an overlapping image within another pictorial frame. These circled “auspicious days” establish a visual reconstruction of the relationship between words and things when juxtaposed with the cake and its candles. A faint arc of rainbow seems less to celebrate than to poke fun at a familiar experience shaped by consumerism. In Dusk, the vivid, fluorescent red of the fatty belly of a tuna glows against the backdrop of a city at twilight. A thumbs-up symbol, resembling an internet reaction emoji, unites external reality with the reality of sensation, precisely pulling and releasing our abstract perception of food between the visual and psychological registers.
Works such as Plating Exercises and Slices of Inspiration reveal a kind of structural politics. Through the seemingly static narrative language of everyday life, they describe a far broader and more complex world. Within these apparently microscopic universes of still life lie correspondences to the events, experiences, and underlying logic of life as a whole.
Cai Qi’s inquiry into identity thus encompasses experiences that are more composite, inward, and ongoing.
And so, although what I see before me are completed, static paintings, I can still perceive the dynamic processes unfolding within their canvases. Cai Qi appears within them as a living, multidimensional practitioner of his own life.
A New Narrative of Still Life
In my conversations with Cai Qi, I learned about the concept of Xenia. Western still-life painting can trace its origins to the xenia frescoes of ancient Greek and Roman art. In Greek, xenia refers to the hospitality a host extends to visitors from distant places, even to strangers. To demonstrate their hospitality, hosts would prepare abundant food for their guests. When these offerings were depicted in frescoes, the images came to be known as xenia—a precursor to what would later develop into still-life painting.
Although Cai Qi’s paintings may bring to mind the still lifes of the Dutch Golden Age, he is, in fact, opposed to the subjective intentions underlying those paintings. What he prefers—or, more precisely, hopes to achieve—is a pictorial quality characterized by objectivity, “coldness,” and a vast openness.
The concept of xenia, and the history of still life itself, therefore acquire a new range of meanings in Cai Qi’s current practice. Objects become points of departure, accommodating and releasing the composite, multivalent, and complex layers of contemporary experience, before ultimately returning to the simplicity of painting itself.
In Finish This Glass and Face the World with a Smile, the gaze focuses on a small detail of a drinking glass. With every brushstroke, Cai Qi renders the texture of the liquid with precision and ease. Although a small explanatory drawing remains in the lower-right corner of the painting, it gradually yields to the commanding formal presence of the composition as a whole. The intensity and purity of the painting’s overall language become its most compelling qualities. The restrained, inscrutable allure of its form takes the place of the layered tension generated by deconstructing the narrative, becoming instead a narrative dimension inherent in painting’s own language.
Of course, at this stage of his development, Cai Qi is already revealing a great deal of what he has been working toward: a young artist’s ordered and wholehearted devotion to painting, together with an unreserved disclosure of the threads of his own life, grounded in that devotion. Looking ahead, he will further distil a pictorial language uniquely his own.
I remember that whenever I visited his home for a meal, even the simplest everyday dishes offered me an inexhaustible sense of ritual from within. This is precisely the kind of ritual I cherish: I dislike pompous, ostentatious ceremony, and much prefer this intimate, understated kind. Cai Qi has a gift for allowing an exacting pursuit of perfection to permeate a quiet, relaxed rhythm, while offering in return the greatest virtues and honours.
His painting is much the same: gentle and smooth, generating a subtle energy from within a quiet, steady composure.
And so I believe that my curiosity about and anticipation for Cai Qi may be more than a simple intuition. They may also be the result of a careful and precise process of reasoning, grounded in both theory and experience. In this, I am confident.
Qian Wenda September 3, 2026
.
食迷
文/钱文达
在我狭隘而刻板的认识里，00后的艺术面貌还未成型，至少，在我看来，还不应该成型。我对于时间和经验上的积累有着潜意识里的强迫，尤其是关于绘画这项媒介。但遇见蔡琦，让我大致开始思考起来关于这些我眼里的这些年轻创作者的新认识与新看法（或者从另一个角度来看，90后早已不再年轻），至少我眼前的蔡琦和他现阶段的作品，以及他的工作方法引起了我莫大的好奇和期待。
餐食：绘画的缘起
艺术圈里懂美食，爱美食的人很多，但大多是年过3旬后的沉淀和积累，是“见过世面”的登味衍生品，谈起某某餐厅或食物所引发的事件不过是为了开启侃侃而谈的自满自足。我所认识的蔡琦则是有条不紊地将对饮食的研究和兴趣分配到他的情绪、性格和命运中——所以，对他来说，画食物，不是单纯为了表达这些美食的精致和可口，而是物中所反映着的最为澄澈、充分的人的诚恳图状。
大致在其本科大三的时候，蔡琦便以饮食为对象进行创作。最开始的蔡琦并没有选择直面描画具有现实画风的饮食。或是出于对创作的过度谨慎，或是对于严苛写实的排斥，他将餐具里的美食置换为乐高材质所模仿出的对象，乐高模具的复制性与工业感和人们对于美食的直观感情期盼之间产生着具有嘲讽口吻般的对立关系。
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。
当然，目前他仍在成长，就像他在钻研那些独具个人风格的饮食菜单一样，他在画布上尝试各种各样现阶段可以充分利用的材料，将不同层次不同质感的媒介空间带入到绘画平面的维度中，让绘画空间和观看的物质空间之间形成微妙的呼应与比对关系。
能够看出这些作品相互之间所共同传递出的艺术家的现阶段状态，因此，每一件作品都包含着艺术家当下所珍视的部分：倾尽所有的平衡、精确、完美，以及达成这一完美必不可少的骄傲、冒险与差错。
这种经验意义上的好奇与诚实比充满目的性的语言早熟更为重要。
内里的身份问题
在和蔡琦的聊天过程中，蔡琦常常谈起绘画中的“身份”问题。
这种身份不是我们平常所讲的社会性身份，不是外在的普遍身份问题，而是一种极其细微很容易被忽视掉的内里身份的线索，是潜意识里自我真实经验的外延与发展。
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。
在这里，身份不是一个既定标记的观念，而是在具体绘画经验上的摩拳擦掌与行云流水。
这种关系上的思辨在蔡琦的作品中往往以超现实的幽默方式呈现。比如《蟹宝说明书》里的说明性描画部分，将这道菜肴的完成步骤一一列出，并以对话框的形式让画幅里的菜肴自身“道出”。在《黄道吉日》里，一块象征着庆祝重要节日的蛋糕蜡烛是画幅的主角，日历上日期的勾画则以另一重画幅的叠影表现出来，那些勾画出的“吉日”与蛋糕蜡烛恰好形成词与物上的视觉重构关系，那影影绰绰的一道彩虹的弧线仿佛不是在庆祝，而是揶揄这一具有消费主义导向的惯常经验。《黄昏》里金枪鱼的中腹肉在城市黄昏的背景下显映着鲜嫩的荧红色，中间一个表情包式的点赞符号将外部现实与感觉现实组合为一体，在视觉和心理层面之间来回精确拉扯着对于食物的抽象感知。
《摆盘练习》和《灵感切片》这样的作品则体现出一种结构政治，用日常静止般的叙事语言去描述更为辽阔复杂的普遍世界，在看似微观的静物宇宙里，对应着一切经验的事体与情理。
蔡琦的身份思辨，包含着更为复合、内里、持续化的经验。
因此，眼前的虽是一幅幅静态的业已完成的画作，但我仍能看到画布之中的动态过程，蔡琦，作为一个鲜活立体的生命实践者，跃然其中。
静物的新叙事
在与蔡琦的沟通中，我了解到了“Xenia”的概念。西方的静物画起源于古希腊和古罗马艺术时期的壁画“Xenia”。” Xenia”在希腊语中的意思为主人对异乡人，甚至陌生人的款待，为了表达主人的好客，主人会准备丰富的美食来宴请远方的客人，这种对美食的描绘以壁画的方式体现，便被称为“Xenia”，也就是之后静物画的意思。
尽管当下蔡琦的绘画会让人们想起荷兰黄金时期的静物画，但蔡琦恰恰反对这些静物画的主观意图——他更喜欢或者说希望自己绘画的质感是充满客观、“冰冷”以及巨大的开放性的。
所以，“Xenia”这一概念以及艺术历史中的静物在当下蔡琦的创作中拥有了新的意义范围：物作为一种开启，容纳并释放着当下复合、多义、复杂的经验层次，并最终回归为绘画的单纯。
《喝完这杯，微笑面对》将视野瞄准为一个酒杯的细微局部，蔡琦每一笔都精确而松弛地将酒水的质感进行着充分的表现。虽然在画作右下角仍然存在着微小的说明性描画，但这种描画逐渐让位给画面整体的形式威压，绘画整体语言的强度和纯度成为最吸引人的部分。那种克制而讳莫如深的形式魅力取代了解构叙事本身的层次张力，进而成为绘画语言自身的叙事层次。
当然，目前这个阶段，蔡琦所能展现出的他已然进行着充分地展现，那是一个年轻人对绘画那富有秩序般的极致的投入与热爱，以及以此为根基的关于自己生命线索的和盘托出。关于未来，他会进一步去纯化出独属自己的绘画语言。
还记得，每次到他家吃饭，就算是简单日常的饭食，也会让我享用到无尽内里的仪式感（恰恰我厌恶冠冕堂皇的仪式感，我更爱这亲切、不事声张的仪式）。他善于将完美极致的需求渗透在无声、松弛的节奏里，却交付出最大的美德与荣耀。
这与他的绘画一样，温柔地，平滑地，于静谧沉稳中生发细致的能量。
所以，我相信，我对蔡琦的好奇与期待可能不仅是一种简单的直觉，更是在理论和经验层面上的审慎精确地推演。我拥有这样的自信。
钱文达
2026/9/3