Cai Lei
Invisible Spaces
ICICLE Cultural Space
Paris
Oct 22–Dec 15, 2025

Since the early 2010s, Beijing-based artist Cai Lei has forged a practice that dissolves boundaries between sculpture, painting, and architecture. A graduate of the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts with a master’s degree in sculpture, he brings an architect’s precision to works that probe at how space is inhabited, measured, and inscribed in memory. Using cement, steel, and acrylic, Cai explores the slippage between vision and experience, as well as the material world and its phantom double. His use of trompe-l’œil—less deception than inquiry—tests the limits of sight itself, coaxing depth from flatness, solidity from air, while revealing the fragile contract between seeing and believing. His art inhabits that charged threshold where vision falters and perception begins.

This inquiry found distilled expression in “Invisible Spaces,” a compact, tightly conceived exhibition—his first in France—presented at ICICLE Cultural Space during Art Basel Paris 2025. The show gathered new sculptures and paintings alongside works from his emblematic Unfinished Home series, staging a confrontation between permanence and decay. Cement—his signature medium—serves as both material fact and symbolic vessel: its gray mass evokes the relentless churn of China’s urban transformation, while unfinished interiors and crumbling thresholds bear the quiet imprint of time and memory. Within these austere geometries, light catches in shallow recesses, while fractured edges suggest both ascent and ruin.

At the center of the exhibition stood Left in the Dust (2025), a spiral staircase punctuated by missing steps, conceived specifically for this presentation. Suspended between collapse and emergence, the work crystallizes Cai’s central paradox: that stability is founded on its own disintegration. His method—what he once described as “constructing illusions to reach the truth of perception”—compels viewers to shift their positions, only to find that certainty remains perpetually elusive.

This conceptual tension extends into his painting. In Space of Space 20230809 (2023), an acrylic-on-canvas rendering of a tiled interior, faint luminosity meets stillness. The room appears to emit light from within yet denies entry, its cracked tiles and destabilized grid quietly undermining any sense of order. The result is suffocating—geometry rendered as metaphor for isolation through the strictures of confinement. Here, as throughout his work, Cai extracts emotional resonance from restraint, making absence the condition of presence.

Across the exhibition, corridors terminate without warning, walls thin into weightless planes, and surfaces oscillate between flatness and depth. What first registers as severity gradually unfolds into a vocabulary of shadow, silence, and fracture. Whether encountered as remnants of a vanishing urban ideal or as constructions of interiority, Cai’s works insist on the inseparability of construction and fragility. “Invisible Spaces” affirms his sustained inquiry into how emptiness accrues meaning—and how the act of seeing may be the most precarious architecture of all.

Yvonne Wang is an art writer and the Singapore desk editor for ArtAsiaPacific.