Lucas Lai

"Beauty has the ability to transcend the quotidian experience and bring us to a place of infinite possibilities."

Born in Taipei, I spent my earliest years in a capital metropolis. When I was six my family went on summer vacation to the United States and we ended up staying - trading the cacophony of city life for the lush orchestrations of evening crickets in upstate New York. It was between this rural beauty and the bustling energy of Manhattan that I grew up and trained my eye as an artist.

When I was sixteen and studying French in school I went to Europe for the first time, to Paris. It felt strangely like coming home, so I ended up moving there for a year when I was twenty. Living in that city taught me what it was like to live beautifully. After college I settled in New York until fate challenged me to trust her blindly, and when I was twenty six I left my life behind and traveled to parts of South America and Asia for 8 months. This trip changed my life in so many ways.

At the end of my trip I moved to Beijing and worked for the artist Ai Weiwei, putting together his photography retrospective for a year. Afterwards I did a 10 month art residency in a medieval village in Burgundy, France, before returning to New York. This time I stayed for almost five years before picking up again and moving to Berlin, where I live now, again working for Ai Weiwei.

Art has always been a part of my life. Beauty is all around us, and I am perpetually in awe of it, inspired to capture its fleeting qualities and share it with others. To me beauty is not something superficial. It can be fundamental to why art exists in the first place. An escape to something beyond words, to a place where there are no limits beyond our imagination.