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For Immediate Release
Sarah Lai: Pure Heart Shopping Street
26 March, 2022 - 7 May, 2022
Venue: Blindspot Gallery (15/F, Po Chai Industrial Building, 28 Wong Chuk Hang Road, Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong)
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10:30am to 6:30pm (Sunday and Monday, by appointment only); closed on public holidays

Blindspot Gallery is pleased to present Sarah
Lai’s solo exhibition Pure Heart Shopping Street.
Presenting a brand-new installation which
unfolds into a collection of light boxes, videos, oilpaintings and other sourced objects, these works
position themselves within a fabricated scene of a
shopping street in 80s and 90s Japan. Interested
in the emotional responses conjured from visuallanguage, Lai sources her visual references fromvintage archives of mass media on the internet,
carrying the power of sentiment and imagination fora bygone era. Against the chaotic overabundanceof visual imagery in the age of digital content, Lai
creates rarified moments and distanced spaces toencounter images in a new light via the possibilitiesof figurative painting installations. The intervening
gesture of art could ever so lightly shift andtransform our relationality to the found image, andSarah Lai, Blue Shorty Shorts, 2022, Oil on canvas, 92 x 123 x 3 cm.
(Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery.)subsequently our relationality to the World.

Pure Heart Shopping Street is a continuation of the artist’s practice of the appropriation, aestheticization, and reactivation ofcontemporary visual culture. The artist meticulously chooses and orchestrates found images, facsimile, props, interior design, andarchitectural forms, to recreate the impression of a scene with minimum visual elements. This is a follow up on previous projects suchas the Gang Killer (Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2021), Kyusekkin! (Love SOS) (Art021, Shanghai, 2018), (In)tangible Reminiscence(Mill6, Hong Kong, 2017), which sources materials and visual language from the pop culture of manga, anime, and TV and printcommercials respectively. The artist holds dear to these materials as formative influences and ingrained mnemonics in her teenage
years growing up in Hong Kong, as Japanese popular and material culture holds sway across emerging economies in Asia. Hyperconscious of its fungible subjectivity, Lai’s project is altogether a representation of deliberate representations, an abstraction ofuntruthful abstractions.

Lai’s exhibition greets with a series of stimuli and selective visual signs. A pink telephone booth brings us to a setting predating portablemobile phones, whilst a video of women fiddling with electronic products loop on a grainy CRT television below a store canopy. Lamps
from the 90s dot the space alongside illuminated large-scale spinning cassette tapes on the wall of a video store, next to a backdropof quaint storefronts. A light box at eye level reads as a street name sign – “Pure Heart Shopping Street”, pinpointing our whereabouts.
Full of considered elements that vie for our attention, Pure Heart Shopping Street equally restrains from offering excess information.
Longing to be seduced with contingency and surprises, we ourselves as observers craft an embodied experience that straddles
between public entertainment and personal delight.
Gracing the gallery walls and the built elements of Pure Heart Shopping Street are Lai’s painted photorealistic depictions of foundimagery rendered in a deliberately cropped close-up. Blue Sporty Shorts (2022) depicts a woman in blue shorts riding a bicycle saddle,
her athletic thighs and round buttocks dominating the picture frame. Another painting renders curled toes underneath nude stockings,
whilst farther ahead we spot a shy face being shielded from view with a cassette box. Lai excels in executing pure, pale-palette images
that are modest and risqué, exuding palpable sensitivity as they reveal the in-betweenness of a female body straddling coy adulthoodand naive adolescence. The painter taps into the obsessive desire to idealize and sexualize the woman’s body, mobilized by a relentlessimage culture to exploit and profiteer.
Lai’s shopping street harks back to the Parisian arcades from the 1840s, the genesis of modern bourgeois visuality luminously
elaborated in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (1927-1940). Lai brilliantly turns the figure of the Baudelairean flâneur, theleisurely young man who saunters in the city in search of desire and pleasure, into the nuanced feminine protagonists frequenting
the Pure Heart Shopping Street. They are reflexive about the ire of consumer culture, critical of the sexualizing identification ofwomanhood, yet not too cynical to partake in the seduction of images and representations, their own or others’. The artist’s alienationand fetishization of cutely anachronistic signifiers are aptly analogized in Roland Barthes’ The Empire of Signs (1970), where theFrench semiotician, after three visits to Tokyo, attempts to “‘entertain’ the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system” without “lovinglygazing toward an Oriental essence.” Like the close up of Lai’s sheer underwear painting This kind of feeling (2022), overlayed by
Japanese hiragana and kanji text, of which Lai is illiterate, the artist boldly utilizes these empty signifiers in the Barthesian. It is exactly
this emptiness and meaninglessness, for both Barthes and Lai, which regenerate the possibility of sheer jouissance and wonder inencountering a visual culture anew.

About Sarah Lai
Born 1983 in Hong Kong, Sarah Lai’s paintings depict objects from daily lives, represented by her signature pale palette and a particular stillness imbued with material
memories. In her most recent practice, Lai uses as inspiration images from films, TV and advertisement of the 1980s-90s, capturing the aesthetics of sensuality
presented by the media of a bygone era, and articulating a delicate subtlety in personal experiences and memories. Lai has exhibited at Seoul Museum of Art (2021),
Para Site, Hong Kong (2018), Center for Heritage Arts & Textiles, Hong Kong (2018), CFCCA, Manchester (2017) amongst other institutions.
About Blindspot Gallery
Set up in 2010, Blindspot Gallery is a Hong Kong-based contemporary art gallery. The gallery began with a primary focus on contemporary photography and imagebased art, and has evolved to include diverse media in contemporary art. The gallery represents both emerging and established artists, mainly from Hong Kong andthe region but also beyond.
For enquiries and media interviews, please contact Ms. Sharon Fung at 2517 6238 or by email sharon@blindspotgallery.com