In Sub Specie Aeternitatis, Gavin Chai illuminates the eternal aspect of our daily lives. His learned and otherworldly paintings and ceramics attend to the small moments that dissolve time and place our innermost feelings on a cosmological scale. Before these works, we are audience to a theatre of missed connections, misplaced faith, and misremembered dreams. They are at once contemporary and as old as time itself.
Like a poet, Chai is an artist who works in the lyric tense, painting the past, present, and future in simultaneity. He is less a painter of scene than of ritual, less a painter of narrative than of feeling. His subjects, in other words, walk in a realm outside of time; they have been there before and will be there again – and again. In Quotidian 仿佛一直白天 (2026), for example, two wan figures meet in a sparsely rendered supermarket. That one faces another seems more incidental than anything, as both look ruefully out to the body of water to their left, just out of reach. No, they do not want to be there, but, to bend a title from John Berger, this is where they meet.
Within this lyrical mode, Chai works from a considered palette of references, its depth and breadth nourished by years of continuous, self-directed study. Outing 郊游 (2026) calls to mind the triangular arrangement of Eduoard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass, both foregrounding three figures on a kind of picnic mat (two sitting, one reclining) as a fourth figure watches on in the background, but equally feels plucked from the recent past of a camping trip, though surely one (like any good family trip) that proved quite trying.
Other paintings pick up with the traditions of Chinese painting and idiom, whether by visuality – as in Perpetual 无止境 (2026), whose ever ascending vertical form owes its composition to the literati painters of the Song dynasty – or thematic content – as in Burning one’s boat (Chinese idiom) 破釜沉舟 (2026), whose dreamlike seafaring imagery is borrowed from the idiom of its title’ (meaning to destroy one’s own boat or, put another way, to fully commit without the option of retreat). For Chai, these traditions are not relics of time gone by. Rather, through sustained, close contemplation of the past, they offer meaningful ways of making sense of the present and moving forward into the future.
This exhibition’s title, which can be translated as Under the Aspect of Eternity, is borrowed from Ethics, the landmark work of preeminent Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. With Chai’s ceramics in mind, it's an apt title. Chai notes that clay connects us to all kinds of deities (God, Prometheus, Nüwa 女娲, Papatūānuku) as the medium of our making by their hand. In turn, the ceramics here are imbued with the sense of their maker – poised, enigmatic, light of touch yet rugged and heavy, but, most of all, utterly timeless.
Text by Matthew Whiteman, 2026
