CORE contemporary art

The Architecture of Contemplation: A Southeast Asian Position in Light and Space

This exhibition proposes that some of the most significant dialogues in contemporary art occur not through the replication of symbols, but through the translation of structural intelligence. In “What Holds the Glow”, Malaysian Chinese spatial artist Kaiyi Wong (unrealitykai) enters a global conversation shaped by artists such as James Turrell, Lee Ufan, and Olafur Eliasson, whose practices treat light, space, and perception as constructed conditions rather than representational effects. Like Eliasson, whose architectural training informs his approach to spatial experience, Kaiyi understands sculpture as an environment to be built and inhabited rather than an object to be viewed.

Yet Kaiyi’s point of departure is distinct. His practice emerges from the condition of the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora, where cultural inheritance often arrives not as a complete system, but as fragments of memory, logic, and spatial intuition. Trained as an architect at the University of Sheffield and shaped through a formative apprenticeship with artist Red Hong Yi, Kaiyi brings rigorous architectural thinking into contemporary sculpture. Working from his studio, “Unreality”, he does not replicate cultural symbols but undertakes a process of architectural archaeology and reconstruction.

He strips away the ceremonial surfaces of traditional Chinese spatial systems—such as the fortified communal logic of the Hakka “tulou (土楼)” and the interlocking intelligence of the “dougong (斗拱)” bracket —t o isolate their underlying principles: modularity, axial symmetry, layered thresholds, balance, and collective orientation. These principles are made manifest through stacked stainless-steel sheets fastened together with rods and nuts, requiring no welding,  and through forms that gather viewers around a shared, illuminated core. In this way, inherited spatial logics are translated into a contemporary material language of steel and light.

This process is not nostalgic recovery but an active method of reconstruction. For Kaiyi, culture is not a stable inheritance but a system continually rebuilt through structure. His work asks not what has been preserved, but what logics endure beneath ornament—what can still be activated to shape how we gather, move, and orient ourselves in space. Identity, in this sense, is not performed but constructed.