Cai Lei is creating a bewildering perceptual experience, which he describes as an experience from the "friction between sculptural and painterly perception."

Gazing at his paintings, one can enter and enjoy this bewildering perception, whilst the vanishing point is initially fixed on the oeuvre, it slowly retreats, firsks, and eventually escapes from sight. As the eyesight is trying to fix its position within the painting, depth of field, light and shadow, distance, and size are all involved in perception, yet they do not lead to a definite space. That is an experience of the coexisting materiality and illusion.

Cai Lei secretly rewrites the assured interrelation between perspective and images. For hundreds of years, this has been a system of exchange between gaze and psychological space, promising spatial stability and certainty through a powerful structure. Currently, this visual language serves as the foundation for Cai Lei’s work. The intricate perspective cannot be comprehended by our brains. Instead, it initiates a more complex and integrated perception.

After years of practice and exploration, Cai Lei’s investigation of his work has gone beyond the deduction of perspective. He aims to fold and stretch this perception, resolving doubts within the painting’s framework through the formation of sculptural perception. Subsequently, he effortlessly confronts the convention of image itself.

Cai Lei’s works require viewers to view them in motion. He incorporates the perceptual process into the artwork itself. Such bodily movement and the accumulated visual experience over time shape the unique dynamic spatial narrative of Cai Lei’s pieces.

Cai Lei also holds the ambition to create new symbols. In this exhibition, the golden sculpture, "The First Chair”, achieves the sublimity promised by visual language itself through its Gothic form. Yet, he deliberately used gold to inject infinite symbolic meaning and imagination, to the point of bursting the symbol itself—the precarious power of dazzling gold, dangerous and brilliant at once.

Although Cai Lei strives to strip away the social attributes in his work, he remains an artist concerned with power structures. None of the creations can escape their metaphorical potential.

Cai Lei’s works continuously guide viewers to affirm reality and emptiness. He uses real perception as the foundation of illusion. This unique perceptual process forms an Escherian space. He allows people to experience consciousness in a new way through creating a physical yet visual illusion in perceptual experience. In the interplay of gaze and consciousness, we enter a labyrinth of perception.