LONDON.- White Cube Mason’s Yard will present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Firenze Lai (b. 1984, Hong Kong), coinciding with Frieze London 2026.

Drawing influence from our ever-increasing time spent online and the continuous development of AI, in her latest works, Lai explores belonging, divisive misinformation, and the impossibility of determining a singular source of truth.

Lai was born in Hong Kong in 1984, where she lived and worked for many years before relocating to London in 2022. Growing up in a densely populated metropolis, she was shaped by the frenetic, labyrinthine cityscapes which were formative to the development of her practice.

Interrogating the social, political and spatial subtexts that influence individual and collective psyches, her dreamlike paintings of anonymous figures and places reflect upon the human condition. The works extend from the arena of the unconscious into that of contemporary life and its entanglement with the digital, functioning for the artist as a ‘navigational’ operation, allowing her to both locate and express herself in a rapidly changing, contradictory world.

Lai’s inspirations traverse time and region, including the esotericism of William Blake and the smears and frantic brushwork of Francis Bacon. Her subdued palette and expressive painting style transform people and places into shapeshifters and phantasms. Elastic and endlessly reconfigurable, figures appear alone or in groups within shifting spaces. Liberating her work from the specifics of time, person and location, the artist has said: ‘Each figure that I paint is the same person […] It is you and I.’





Firenze Lai lives and works in London. She studied at the Hong Kong Art School from 2004 to 2006. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at MAMC+, Saint-Étienne, France (2019) and Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, China (2015). Lai’s work has been featured in group exhibitions including Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2025); The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2025); HKW, Berlin (2025); M+, Hong Kong (2024); Centre Pompidou Málaga, Andalusia, Spain (2023); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2022); Kadist, San Francisco, California (2020); BWA Wrocław, Poland (2020); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019); 57th Venice Biennale, Italy (2017); New Museum Triennial, New York (2015); 10th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China (2014) and Para Site, Hong Kong (2013).