Lai Yu Tong’s solo exhibition at ShanghArt, Singapore, marks a significant emotional deepening of his practice
Stray dogs are often found in the industrial areas of Singapore, where they hang out in unmanaged green patches and seek shelter in the occasional abandoned factory. My father-in-law used to run a timber factory in one of these places and every time I visited, I felt the dogs’ watchful gazes and quick, darting presences; one or two were always surveilling you from behind a tree or a wall and would lope away at our approach. At night, they grew bolder. If you drove in, they chased after your car, snapping and barking.
Neither version of these street dogs – the shy daytime canine or nighttime gangster – are captured in Singaporean Lai Yu Tong’s latest exhibition, which is, in part, about a pack of stray dogs that reside near his home, and whom he followed and sketched obsessively over a few months. Rather, this quiet and atmospheric show, which features drawings, collages, a sculpture and a sound work, presents a ghostly, abstracted vision of these free-roaming creatures.
When you enter the gallery, the lights are so low that the strongest source of illumination comes from the daylight streaming in from the door behind you. Inside, the walls are painted black, and from which the drawings, made mostly on light-coloured paper, appear to glow. Closer inspection reveals that the drawings of these dogs are created with thousands of densely packed, light-coloured pencil-scratches. The compositions are simple: one or two canine standing, their outlines gently coalescing out of the foggy markings. Their dogs’ forms are graceful and simplified: with small heads, the swell of their bellies tapers to a tiny waist, before flowing down to slender, angular legs.
Lai’s economy of form manages to generate a range of moods. The pastel-on-board drawing The Dogs (Road) (all works 2025) depicts two small dogs, their forms as suggestive and haunting as those of cave paintings, resting in a large open space whose borders are vaguely delineated by grey smudges and vertical lines; it’s a sort of non-place that manages to be both bleak and Elysian at the same time. Then there are the ‘cuter’ works, evoking a playful and childlike aspect in these mongrels. Dog (Greywash) is a sculpture made from wooden offcuts that are arranged to make a ‘blocky’ version of a dog; The Dogs (Burnt Hole) is a sweet collage work comprising small pieces of cardboard cut and layered into canine form. Despite these moments of levity, the overall atmosphere of the show is one of melancholy, helped along by the mournful notes playing from a recorded piece of improvised music performed and composed by the artist on a shruti box, a harmonium-like instrument that originated on the Indian subcontinent and that works via a system of bellows that produce long, droning sounds.
It is tempting to slap an allegorical reading onto this exhibition, as a metaphor for the untamed forces – nature, illegals or itinerants – living on the margins of a tightly controlled Singapore. But the apparent collectedness, aloofness and sombreness of Lai’s dogs render them more akin to hermetic Zen masters than rebels. There is nothing to suggest that they might be read as flouting any human rules and regulations; rather they appear to exist on a different plane to such conventions.
Lai’s past work has relied on a simple, minimalist aesthetic, created out of mundane, everyday materials like newspapers and wooden scraps, exploring equally lowkey, almost wilfully bland topics, such as cars and chairs. Some of his oeuvre can come across as anodyne, verging on precious. In that respect, The Dogs marks a significant emotional deepening of his practice, perhaps due to the life he captures in his subjects, which he portrays with relatable tenderness. This is a patient and sustained study. Lai loves these dogs and we feel it too.
Lai Yu Tong: The Dogs at ShanghArt, Singapore, through 2 November
From the Winter 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
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