Neon Parc

Spencer Lai (b. 1991, Malaysia) is an Australian-Chinese artist currently based in Berlin. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, and expanded painting, his practice explores themes of identity, desire, psychology, and commodity culture.

Influenced by architecture, design, and fashion, Lai’s work blends Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions, incorporating personal memories, fantasy, and automatic mark-making. Decorative materials, craft-based processes, and unconventional media play a central role in Lai’s practice. His work frequently engages with cultural detritus, reconfiguring found materials and imagery, reflecting on the intersections of value, personhood, and the unconscious. His practice embraces both playfulness and unease, exploring the duality of beauty and abjection within contemporary and traditional cultures.

Spencer Lai has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Impressions’ Mackintosh Lane, London, 2025; ‘Modes’, Neon Parc, 2024; ‘Let us be silent […], Neon Parc, 2023; ‘Academy for the Sensitive Arts’, Theta, New York, 2022; ‘A Patience Game’ with Jürgen Baumann, Holden Garage, Berlin, 2022; ‘Oriental Painting.’, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2022; ‘buddhaminefield’, Ge Hinnom Small Group Love, South London, 2021; ‘Air becomes metallic […]’, Kimberly-Klark, New York, 2018.

Recent group exhibitions include: ‘The Possibilities are Immense’, George Paton Gallery, Melbourne, 2024; ‘All Good Things’, Hulias, Oslo, 2024; ‘At Home with Painting’, School of Art Gallery, Sydney, 2024; ‘Backwash’, Drill Hall Gallery, 2023; ‘Menagerié’, Asbestos, 2023; ‘You’re Finally Awake!’, Theta, New York, 2022; ‘The body speaks before it even talks’, 99%, Melbourne, 2022; ‘Comfort the Afflicted’, Envy, Wellington, 2022; ‘1991’ Neon Parc, Melbourne (2020); ‘Dress Rehearsal (with Rare Candy/Centre for Style)’, 9th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2016); ‘TarraWarra Biennale: Endless Circulation (with Jake Swinson, Jessie Kiely, Fayen d’Evie and Matthew Linde)’, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria (2016).

Lai’s work is included in the Artbank collection, Australia; Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra; and private collections throughout Australia and the United States.

Elizabeth Newman (b. 1962, Naarm/Melbourne) has been making and exhibiting art throughout Australia and overseas since the 1980s. A painter by training, she has expanded her practice over the years to include wall works, objects, text-based works and writing. Her innovative and experimental work has significantly influenced her contemporaries and, further, on younger generations of artists who regard her work as exemplary.
Newman’s work is regarded as a significant advance to formalist-conceptualist discourse in Australia, and her writings are incisive articulations of this aesthetic and psychological terrain. Her broader conception of practice has also been influential and has seen her working beyond an individual subjective position as a collaborator and vocal and intellectually rigorous member of the art community.

Elizabeth Newman has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Loss of World’, Neon Parc, 2023; ‘Un-titled: Elizabeth Newman’ Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2022; ‘Elizabeth Newman: Is that a ‘No’?’, Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, 2020; ‘Elizabeth Newman’, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2019; ‘So many lights and so much darkness’, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2018; ‘Mira Gojak / Elizabeth Newman’, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2017; ‘Elizabeth Newman: Pop Up Store’, Knulp, Sydney, 2017.

Newman has published widely, including ‘Still makin’ history …’ & ‘Drawings’ (2023), co-published by Neon Parc and Discipline; ‘Texts’ (2019), a collection of 25 texts by Elizabeth Newman; and the major monograph ‘More than What There Is’ (2013), published by 3-ply.

Newman’s work is included in major Australasian public and private collections, including The Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Artbank, Australia; The Kerry Stokes Collection, Melbourne; HOTA: Home of the Arts, Gold Coast; UQ Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane; The Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne; The Dobell Foundation Collection, Sydney; The Sir James and Lady Cruthers Collection, Perth; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Hewlett Packard Australia and The William Bowness Collection, Melbourne.