Born in 1983 in Macao, Lai Sio Kit is a graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). He is currently the director of the Chinese Artists Association, vice president of the Macao Art Association and president of the Macao Youth Art Association. As an art activist who straddles between creation and education, he is also the founder and Art Director of the Pangaea Art Education Centre, and has taught in many universities in Macao, building a chain of aesthetic transmission from the academy to society.

 

Lai Sio Kit's creations have been labelled as ‘the visual coder of Macau's urban poetics’ - from the crinkled texture of rooftops viewed from above, to the slices of private rooftops framed by telescopes; from the weathering marks of century-old bricks and tiles, to the topography of light and shadows in the reinforced jungle. He dissects the texture of the city with a camera-like gaze, and through the overlapping materiality of the oil paintings, he translates the skin of the buildings into a ‘skin file’ that carries the collective memory. This unique syntax between topographical investigation and lyrical abstraction has formed a highly recognisable aesthetic specimen of contemporary Macau.

 

His works have been exhibited in four consecutive exhibitions at the Oriental Museum of Portugal (Lisbon), the National Art Museum of China (Beijing), the Minsheng Art Museum (Beijing), and the Art Warehouse Gallery (Shanghai), and have been selected for four times in the National Art Exhibition, which is the most prestigious exhibition of China's art world. He has been nominated for the Oriental Foundation's Grand Prize for Plastic Arts and the John Moore Painting Prize (China), and his works are in the collections of the Oriental Foundation of Portugal, the Macao Museum of Art, and other institutions, as well as in important private collections in many countries.