Newspaper Painting No. 111

Lai Yu Tong's ongoing series, Newspaper Paintings, is a response to the unrelenting proliferation of images in everyday life. In working with newspapers, the artist felt that the cacophony of images vying for attention within stories and advertisements  created a chaotic space. Painting thus became a gesture to return order to the pages, removing unnecessary elements to create clarity and focus. 

The two pairs of hands in Newspaper Painting No. 111, (2021) seem to acquire a strange prescience when the artist suffered a bad accident involving his right thumb, shortly after completing the work. The disembodied hands that float on a sea of white remind us how hands are the artist's most valuable tools and are often behind human acts of destruction and creation. While he recovered from the accident, the artist was forced to draw with his left hand, resulting in one of his most creatively productive periods of his artistic practice to date.