Lai Yu Tong's 'The Dogs' at ShanghArt Singapore explores stray canines through drawings, sculpture, and sound

Lai Yu Tong's solo exhibition 'The Dogs' at ShanghArt in Singapore, running through 2 November 2025, presents a ghostly, abstracted vision of stray dogs near his home, based on months of obsessive sketching. The show features drawings, collages, a sculpture, and a sound work, with a low-lit, black-walled gallery where light-colored pencil-scratched drawings appear to glow. Works include 'The Dogs (Road)' (2025), a pastel-on-board drawing depicting two dogs in a bleak yet Elysian non-place, and 'Dog (Greywash)', a sculpture made from wooden offcuts. A recorded piece of improvised music on a shruti box, composed and performed by Lai, adds a mournful atmosphere. The exhibition marks an emotional deepening of Lai's practice, moving beyond his previous minimalist aesthetic focused on mundane materials like newspapers and wooden scraps, which explored topics such as cars and chairs. Stray dogs in Singapore's industrial areas, often shy by day and bold at night, inspired the artist, though his portrayal avoids allegorical readings of marginal forces, instead presenting the dogs as hermetic Zen masters. The show is reviewed in the Winter 2025 issue of ArtReview Asia.