Lai Yu Tong: The Dogs
ShanghART Singapore is pleased to present Lai Yu Tong’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, The Dogs, opening on 30 August 2025. Featuring a new series of works that centres around his encounters with a pack of stray dogs, the artist invites us to reconsider our relationship with entities that exist on the fringes of our environments, while reflecting upon his own experiences and interactions with the dogs across several months.
Drawing upon observations of the present, Lai’s practice examines the overlooked and neglected. Everyday objects and subjects such as cars, crows, hands, and chairs feature as motifs across his works that are cast within the stories and scenarios that he creates around them. By looking at something for extended periods of time, he brings out alternative perspectives on the familiar. Recently, his gaze fixates upon the stray dogs that he encounters around a forested area close to where he lives. Their existence as wild, untamed and shy creatures that roam under the shadows of Singapore intrigues him.
In a highly developed and controlled society, the presence of these dogs introduces a degree of unpredictability, even instilling a sense of danger. Initial encounters with them ended with Lai retreating out of fear. However, following multiple visits where he would observe, photograph and sometimes feed the dogs, the fear that he felt eventually shifts into a kind of love, as he forms a connection with these misunderstood creatures.
Storytelling makes up a big part of Lai’s approach, manifesting in forms such as drawing, sculpture, and sound. In these latest works, Lai seeks to retell his encounters with these enigmatic creatures through intimate pieces of drawings and collages on various modest everyday materials — cardboard, wood, and paper. He simultaneously draws and obscures the dogs, playing with techniques of erasure and transparency that render his subjects as ghostly figures and impressions. Such loose methods of representation alludes to the elusiveness and placelessness of the subjects he draws, whilst also allowing them to take on other identities and connotations.
Through a selection of two-dimensional works, a sculpture, a sound piece and a performance, the gallery space is transformed into a site of encounter between the audience and the dogs. Bridging the distance between us and them through Lai’s own experiences, the exhibition encourages visitors to empathise and identify with the beings that live on the edges of our environments; out of sight and away from what we are familiar with.
