You think of the sculptures as offerings because the liquid rhythms of their material states are so often syncopated by recesses and receptacles. Yet even the remotest dimensions are somehow regularised. You consider that modularity of folded stainless-steel, with screens inset, as a tracking of interspersing temporalities. Reintroducing footage from a past work, here the materiality of time purls in the inherent transiency of its content. Segmented linearity is projecting recorded material of billowing vapours, its speeds behaving less for viewing than for functioning as its bracketed area defines its time. Delicately exposed cables tenderly relay the electrical energy. Those warm, slender tethers are coordinating footage of dissolvable and dissipative pyrotechnic smokes, flowing out, asynchronized, as blinking and moving images. Trailing the air, smokes rebegin from a picked-out spark. [...]

What else might these sculptures hold out to you? A hand, almost. Pale luminance contours a pair of shallow, deliquescent trays cast in white wax and stationed low on the wall. Since one is brim-full of rainwater, the resultant stillness summons a circular inspection of some fresh quarry within you, a hankering that doesn’t yet understand the shape of its yearning: To drink? To wash? To quench? To immerse? The water lays like a crush. Yes, always with circumscribed water: the prospect of satiety. You find similar senses within a whorled ground comprising repeat wax castings of gold panning vessels. Fatiguing and imprinting the positive and negative space of the containers, here process has stressed the tolerances of casting itself. Your attention renews and reinscribes its carefully writ rings, they draw you in, as if your very thoughts might begin to sift a glistened epiphany. Its roving radiality occasions a votive attendance from you as you orbit it. Arriving like a skipping stone with its dispersive physics, you take its hollows in.

– Alex Bennett on Phillip Lai, Breaks, Precipitates, 2026

Over the past three decades, Phillip Lai has developed a sculptural language which explores approaches to the ubiquitous materials and experiences that derive from a techno-industrial culture – such as that of mass production, functionality, the mechanistic, automation, ergonomics, and infrastructure. Its basis refers to our psychological interactions in this culture, as well as an intermingling with it. Transfers or retentions of energy are envisioned, through materials and objects that often suggest the support of basic daily functions, needs and the sustaining of human life. Containers; plates, sinks, bowls, or barrels – the receptacles that typically carry raw materials or food, often appear alongside other motifs, such as cloth - in the form of jute, clothing, tarpaulin - layers utilised to provide protection, shelter or warmth. Across all of Lai’s work, he excavates for something deeper and beyond the apparent inertia of objects. This excavation, as though to glimpse more clearly the underlying interaction of things, seems to reach for the quietest, most remote trace of figuration that may belie their abstraction.

Phillip Lai was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1969 and moved to London in 1979, where he continues to live and work. He holds both BA and MA Fine Art degrees from Chelsea School of Art & Design, completing his studies in 1994. Lai has been a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London since 2001. In 1997, he presented his first solo exhibition at The Showroom, London. His work has been the subject of subsequent solo exhibitions at Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong (2023); Modern Art, London (2021); Galleria Franco Noero, Turin (2019); Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong (2018); Camden Art Centre, London (2014); and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2009). Lai has participated in group exhibitions at Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre (2023); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2022); Modern Art, London (2021); Nottingham Contemporary (2014); Tate Modern, London (2010); Artists Space, New York (2006); Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2005); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998); and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1994). In March 2018, he was shortlisted for the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, and from 2017–2019 was awarded the Sculpture Fellowship at the Kenneth Armitage Foundation, London. His works are held in collections including the Arts Council Collection, London; M+, Hong Kong; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; and Tate, London.