Cai Ruei-Heng: Swaying Icon: Solo Exhibition

Let’s Complete This Absurd Ritual Together! Cai Ruei-Heng’s Solo Exhibition “Swaying Icon”

Text by Shih Yu Chen

Artist Cai Ruei-Heng studied industrial management at university before taking his first job as a quality control inspector at a factory, where his daily task was to determine whether products met the required standards. Yet he found this surprisingly difficult. It was not that the standards were unclear, but that he sometimes found the items classified as defective more appealing: pieces sewn the wrong way around, or ivory white tinged slightly yellow. There was an inexplicable attraction to these irregularities, and this early sense of uncertainty would later quietly find its way into his paintings.

From the Dog Series, which Cai began during graduate school, to his current solo exhibition, Swaying Icon, at BACK_Y, his artistic practice has followed a consistent internal logic. In dogs, Cai observed subtle parallels between pets and humans, and between individuals and society. Dogs are conditioned by rules, attempt to defuse awkward situations by acting cute when they misbehave, and can feel equally at a loss when placed among unfamiliar groups. This suspended state of being, unable to fully belong yet with nowhere else to go, has long fascinated Cai. In this exhibition, it unfolds through an increasingly complex visual language.

Contradictions Created Through Collage

The Super Lake Circuit Race, the largest painting in the exhibition, can be seen as an expression of Cai’s fascination with the suspended state of “not belonging here, yet pretending to belong.” At first glance, the work appears to depict racehorses galloping across a grassy field. A closer look, however, reveals a camel unexpectedly placed among them. The surrounding race scene is tense and chaotic, while the two figures riding the camel leisurely occupy themselves with something entirely unrelated to the competition. This sense of contradiction and incongruity can perhaps also be traced to Cai’s approach to composition.

Cai Ruei-Heng’s paintings do not begin from a blank canvas. Instead, they are constructed through the collage of disparate images. He collects a vast range of visual material, searching for elements that resonate with him, removing them from their original contexts, and allowing them to encounter other images anew on the canvas. “What I want is to take certain elements that an image gives me, and then try to steal even more,” he explains. Yet what is being stolen is not the image itself. In appropriating existing imagery, Cai does not seek to evoke its original source in the viewer’s mind, but rather to convey the feelings that the image evokes in him.

In Murder Play and The Murder Play of Bird’s Nest Head, Cai Ruei-Heng draws on illustrations from medieval manuscripts. He is particularly drawn to the way painters of the period seemed relatively unconcerned with anatomical accuracy: figures often appear with distorted proportions and exaggerated, theatrical gestures, even as they were intended to convey serious moral narratives. Cai finds something deeply familiar in this peculiar combination of solemnity and absurdity.

In works such as Cavalryman, Archer, and Headless Knight, Cai similarly appropriates imagery of medieval knights. Yet through trembling lines and distorted proportions, he strips these scenes of the brutality of war, transforming the figures into characters that appear at once comical and powerless.

Cracks in the Sway

The title Swaying Icon originated from a story Cai Ruei-Heng encountered about an incident in 1985 in the small Irish town of Ballinspittle, where a witness claimed to have seen a roadside statue of the Virgin Mary move on its own. Similar sightings were soon reported elsewhere. To Cai, this collective illusion, somewhat reminiscent of the Mandela effect, carries something of the intrigue of a haunting. The religious sanctity once believed to be immutable was quietly unsettled by this slight movement. “It feels as though the sway might reveal something,” Cai says.

What this sway might reveal can perhaps be seen in Golden Chandelier. At the centre of the painting hangs an elaborate crystal chandelier, yet it lacks the opulent sheen one might expect from metal. Stranger still, two seemingly unrelated statues appear atop it. In Europe, chandeliers have long been closely associated with religious culture, dating back to the Middle Ages, when they served as ceremonial lighting and symbols of the sacred. Cai’s chandelier, however, possesses the characteristic sense of dampness that runs throughout his paintings. The paint is thin and translucent, saturated with moisture, as though it might seep downward at any moment. The chandelier thus becomes blurred, distorted, and precariously unstable. Works such as Small Pendant Light, Candlestick, and Sacred Spring present similar scenes. This sense of dampness initially emerged from Cai’s sensory experience of living in Taipei, but over the years has gradually developed into a visual language of disorder and instability, creating cracks in the once-inviolable sanctity of the objects depicted.

The appearance of statues from unknown origins also gives the image of the ghost a tangible presence. Cai was initially inspired by a film in which the protagonist dies in an accident and continues to linger around his former home as a ghost. Even as the house falls into decay over the course of a century, the ghost remains, wandering in the same place. On one occasion, Cai came across old decorative statues in a London cemetery and was struck by how they resembled ghosts trapped in place, silently witnessing the transformation, rise, and decline of the city. Over time, this image became internalised as a language through which he could describe his own position: unable to find a way out, yet equally unable to enter the centre of society, suspended somewhere in between, with no choice but to pretend he knows what he is doing.

“I know you’re playing a part, and you know that I know you’re playing a part, but let’s complete this absurd ritual together,” Cai says lightly. Yet this lightness is itself a performative strategy, much like the statues standing inexplicably atop a chandelier, or a camel that has wandered onto a racetrack and pretends to be one of the competitors. Cai’s paintings are populated by many such figures. Amid deliberately constructed scenes of disorder, they do not seek to resist, but instead find a way of carrying on. This, too, reflects Cai’s introspective observation of contemporary society through his position as an artist.