I-Ling Lai

As an international visual artist, Ling aspires to invoke interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogues in her works.

I-Ling Lai ( b.1997) lives and works in London. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Calligraphy Art and Chinese Painting at the National Taiwan University of Art in 2019. Drawing on both eastern and western traditions, Ling has developed her artistic practice of Chinese calligraphy, paintings and drawings. She combines these traditions to ex-plore ideas, systems and experiences of languages and its limits. Her practice tests both the restrictions and possibilities of traditional Chinese calligraphy to explore themes of desire, ambivalence and obsession; subjects that are typically considered impossible to express in traditional calligraphy.

She explores these subjects using simplified traditional Chinese calligraphy characters and a repetitive mark making techniques. Without excessive sketches or references, the outcomes are authentically pure. However, she still considers semi-cursive script as a necessary element to present her style in painting, bringing language to another level through transformation and integration.

The use of line in Ling’s works is at once diaristic and abstract, descriptive and opaque, creating unique rhythms across time and space. The relationship between each line pre-sents a dialogue, which gradually becomes visible though impressions of thoughts, inter-acting through reduction and amplification.