Honolulu artist Lauren Chai’s first solo exhibition, The Five Senses, which runs at the Honolulu Museum of Art through January 14, 2024, explores themes of trauma, grief and healing through paintings and multimedia works inspired by her Korean heritage and imbued with hidden images.
Now watch." Lauren Hana Chai pulls the drapes and dims the lights in her studio loft in downtown Honolulu. Lithe as a dancer, she grabs a retro floor lamp, wielding it from the hip and spraying the fourteen-by-eight-foot work-in-progress on the wall with black light-the stuff of '60s head shops and Grateful Dead posters. Only here, tiny tigers, fish, the undersides of mountains and human figures vibrate with uncanny, throbbing fluorescence.
"Now notice the messages to my mom," she says. "'To Mira, Love Always Hana.'" Even incomplete, the future centerpiece of Chai's debut exhibition at the Honolulu Museum of Art, opening August 10, reads like a scroll uniting the themes of her past eight years of work. The messages come from her first sustained series, Last Known Location, six 2016 paintings of scenes in Honolulu, LA, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, etc., each with an infant Chai and her mother, Mira-who disappeared when Chai was 11.
Raised in Honolulu by her Korean-born grandparents, Chai says she "was always drawing, making sketchbooks-my go-to form of escapism. I was always drawing other people," she says. Every year until she turned 16, Chai went to Korea to visit her father, who ran a bar. Like a teen Toulouse-Lautrec, she "sat in the corner and drew all the patrons," including her uncle Soo Young Chai, a blues musician. Four years of art classes at McKinley High School were followed by six years at Academy of Art University at San Francisco, with the intention of becoming a commercial illustrator. But three years in she found herself rejecting the client-based approach. She also went into therapy to confront the hole in her psyche: abandonment. Coinciding with her immersion in oil painting, it launched her on the road to HoMA.
"She came on my radar during the pandemic," says Halona Norton-Westbrook, the museum's director and CEO. "I came upon one of her prints, and I thought, 'That is really interesting; I haven't seen anything like this here.'" Norton-Westbrook wanted "to understand more about her work, to understand the journey she had been on as an artist. The moment she was in."
Indeed. It's impossible not to be thrilled by the march of Chai's imagination and execution, her comfort in mixing Impressionist modes of collage and quotation with Klimt-like decadence, marinated in Korean cultural tropes-and sex. Starting in 2016, Chai's work combined formal Korean elements with garish streetwise provocations that earned her a label as an "erotic" painter. By 2020's Little Death series, psychedelic decay sets in alongside ecstatic pulses.
Her HoMA show, The Five Senses, is both a retrospective and a bold leap into Chai's newest imagery, which combines Buddhist and Christian elements, hyperbolic geometry and allusions to allegorical art such as Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights." Through it all we glimpse the artist dancing ahead of us, beckoning us, following the echo of those footsteps in the dark.
