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 graduated from Honours at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2014. Working across multiple forms and formats, including sculpture, installation, curation, writing, drawing, Lai’s practice produces associative meaning from a range of accumulated materials that are worked into assemblages, expanded paintings and installations. These materials often include text, found objects, design elements or images from consumer cultures, lifted from thrift stores, replicated, or traced or by chance encounters.

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 so that we may hear the whisper of God: strained tremors of life rise from dark billows of muteness as a modern wind soars beneath engineered wings’, 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 scented as anger is emitted, a bounding animal halts as blood in crimson unfurls in still waterhole’, Kimberly-Klark, New York, 2018.

Recent group exhibitions include: ‘The Possibilities are Immense: Fifty Years of the George Paton Gallery’, 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 works are held in the collections of Drill Hall Gallery and Artbank, as well as private collections in Australia and the United States.

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Elizabeth Newman was born in Naarm/Melbourne in 1962. She lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

Elizabeth Newman 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.

Recent solo exhibitions by the artist include: Loss of World at Neon Parc, Melbourne, Australia in 2023; …and the world flew off its axis at Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, Australia in 2022; Untitled at Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, Australia in 2021; and Elizabeth Newman: Is that a ‘No’? at Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane, Australia in 2020.