Jennifer G. Lai is a Chinese American artist, poet, and audio producer. Her work aims to collapse borders, fashion new timelines, and create new utopias. In decontextualizing and reconstructing worlds, she imagines both alternate pasts and hopeful futures.
Lai’s visual work has participated in exhibitions at Jip Gallery and Olympia Gallery (A Place To Visit, V.3), for Asian American Arts Alliance (Futures Ever Arriving at Chelsea Market) and in Volume IV of Canto Cutie. In 2021, she and artist Angbeen Saleem received a grant from New York Foundation of the Arts to put on an interactive show, TAKE WHAT YOU NEED.
Her poetry has appeared in Pigeon Pages, ANOMALY, and The Slowdown among others. In 2020, her poems were finalists for the Palette Poetry Prize and Sundress Publications’ Broadside Contest. Most recently, her poem “In My Mind's Coral, Mother Still Calls Us Inside” was published in the anthology The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal in 2023. As part of the first cohort of Catapult’s poetry generator with Angel Nafis, she is working on a forthcoming manuscript, DUST WE CARRY.
She lives in Brooklyn and on the internet.
bio
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artist statement
My art practice is guided by my curiosity, emotions, and deep fascination with diaspora, belonging, and power.
Through mixed media collage, I weave together a tapestry of disparate elements—decades, countries, landscapes, personal mementos, and people—forging new and often unexpected connections that transcend time and place.
At the heart of my practice lies a commitment to reclamation and protection, where subjects are often freed from their original contexts to inhabit new narratives within my work. By dismantling traditional boundaries, I invite viewers to reconsider preconceived notions and explore the fluidity of identity and what it means to be perceived.
In viewing my work, viewers might reflect on who they might identify with — and what power dynamics might exist. Who and what do they gravitate towards? Whose gaze should be interrogated more closely? It’s an opportunity for self-reflection and an acknowledgment that who we are cannot be divorced from individual or collective communities.
The stories we tell ourselves shape our reality. When we embrace the messy and unexpected, we can pave the way for a universe of endless possibilities.
recent
2023
COLLAGE AS MAGIC fall residency for Kolaj Magazine in New Orleans
Poetry and feature in the anthology The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal alongside Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Jane Hirshfield
Third year judge for The New York Times’ annual Student Podcast Contest
Workshop at The Art Students League, Psychology of Collage