Gavin Chai - Poesies

Posies is a new series of atmospheric paintings and ceramics which capture the essence of the human condition and the impact of the modern world on individuals. Despite their often stark realism, Chai’s masterful work have a an eerie sense of the surreal, inviting viewers to contemplate the themes of alienation and our longing for connection & meaning.

In his new body of work Poesies, Chai creates a body of work where myth, memory, and the human condition intertwine in a dreamlike yet grounded visual language. . The exhibition’s title draws on Titian’s celebrated Poesie paintings for King Philip II of Spain, themselves inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Like Titian, Chai reaches into the well of classical storytelling - but where the Renaissance master looked to the sunlit, Bacchanalian spirit of Greco-Roman epics, Chai often paints by moonlight.

For Chai, the sun represents reality: day, labour, and hardship - while the moon becomes poetry: night, reverie, and reflection.

As the moon reflects the sun, poetry reflects reality. In his paintings, the moon is no mere celestial object, but a woman, a muse who offers both inspiration and dreams. This poetic duality - between the stark light of reality and the softened glow of imagination, threads through the exhibition.

Chai’s Poesies are not literal landscapes. They are pictorial inventions shaped by a belief that art can transmute the brutal into the beautiful, and that dreams can reframe hardship. By referencing Greek and Chinese mythology alongside biblical motifs, Chai put wings to reality, offering his viewers a reimagining of the everyday. His paintings are less about depicting the world as it is, and more about enlarging its imaginative terrain.

This dialogue with antiquity extends beyond Western art history. Chai’s interest in Han Yong and Tang Sancai burial figures mirrors the early Modernists’ fascination with African masks, not as exotic objects, but as distillations of soul and form. For Chai, these ancient Chinese artefacts hold a minimalism that is both elegant and essential, their simplified bodies carrying profound interior life. They offer him a formal and spiritual model for his own figurative work, where essence outweighs ornament.

In Poesies, reality is never denied, but it is softened, refracted, and transformed through a painterly lens attuned to metamorphosis. Chai’s moonlit visions invite us into a space where poetry and hardship coexist, where myth and memory sit side by side, and where the everyday is given wings—fragile, perhaps, but luminous enough to carry us a little closer to beauty.