Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? ……When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4,7)

Lo Lai Lai Natalie, an artist keen on farming, lives and practices her art basically around fields or between cities, using art forms such as video and sound to explore the complicated relationship between humankind and nature: from the interaction with nature, including confrontation and coexistence, Lai Lai extracts the ideas of man and nature with perspicacity, and she takes unique approaches to digging into forgotten shreds of memory. All these inspirations and achievements from nature constitute the expressive motif of this solo exhibition of Lai Lai.

Just as the exhibition title As Shards of Dawn Shot Through the Dark is a reverse of the famous lines in Faust - A part of darkness, mother of the light, /Proud light, that seeks a sway imperial, /Outranking far the ancient realm of night, the artist, in her artwork of the same name, explores the ecosystem formed in the dark and the ways of survival of various creatures by observing the alternation between day and night in the countryside. The mutual dependence between species also inspired the artist to reflect on the standard of good and evil in human society. Screens are installed for image projection in the exhibition space in order to put up a switch for the different rooms of light or darkness.

Unlike Hong Kong artists who care more about identity and intervention, Lai Lai marries her art with romanticized imagination from a more macroscopic framework (man and nature) or through less significant approaches (personal growth experience). For example, A Messenger - Passerby in Our Battlefields is a work of moving images where a flying bird turns suddenly into a silhouette in the end; the trace it leaves in human life becomes a story that can be told by somebody or falls into oblivion. In Morning Glory, the artist revisits the park where she spent time in her childhood, and, by reminiscing the morning glory in the park, she also recalls memory about her mother in those days. The connection in between and the sorrow caused by enduring illness hide tenderly beneath these emotional images. The artist clearly doesn’t want such complex and ambiguous relationship to be resolved into a contrast merely from the symbolic point of view, so we can see her aesthetics about hope and her poetic resistance. And, from her recent paintings, we can also perceive the charm of some poisonous animals and plants that have been interdependent with humans for many years.

What Lai Lai, having found her peace in nature, has created, however, is not simply about a way of still living elsewhere in such a humanized world. In her hand-coloring photography series, The Circadian Clock, she introduced the concept of plant intelligence and highlights the photopigment, which guides the growth of species, from the botanical perspective. The video work A Continuous Coloring Game looks at the complicated growth environment for species. In the aerial view, Nam Sang Wai, Yeun Long undergoes a fire and regenerates afterwards, which reveals the possibility of reconstruction of various things from wreckage. And, compared to the loving dialogue between vegetable sprouts and the planter in the video, the restrained tone of the voice-over reminds us that the praise of the beauty born out of this may imply nothing but some romanticized product. Just as in the video As Shards of Dawn Shot Through the Dark, she asks whether there’s an end to human desire to record and explore the world that can’t be seen with the naked eye, through the exploration of night walkers and the interest of ecological photographers in infrared photography and luminous animals and plants as well as their practice. Is the ambitious chase of light a form of autonarcosis or a search for survival with no other way out?