Spencer Lai

Spencer Lai’s work explores how consumerism, cultural objects, and everyday ephemera shape identity. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, and expanded painting, he collects and reassembles materials, images, texts, and design fragments from personal and consumer cultures to form associative compositions and assemblages. Through reworking and reconfiguring accumulated cultural detritus, Spencer’s practice reflects on the relationships between cultural forms, value, personhood, identity formation, and the unconscious.

Lai has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Impressions Mackintosh Lane, London (2025); Modes, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2024); He has left us alone but shafts of light sometimes grace the corner of our rooms: Lotus-Eaters, Asbestos, Melbourne (2023); Let us be silent so that we may hear the whisper of God: strained tremors of life rise from dark billows of muteness as a modern wind soars beneath engineered wings, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2023); Academy for the Sensitive Arts, Theta, New York (2022).

Recent group exhibitions include I  Lizzy, Neon Parc, Melbourne (2025); At Home with Painting, School of Art Gallery, Sydney (2024); Backwash, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra (2023); You’re Finally Awake!, Theta, New York (2022).

Spencer Lai is represented by Neon Parc, Melbourne.