Firenze Lai

During the Umbrella Movement, a pro-democracy movement happened in 2014, Lai illustrated for the cover of the second issue of Harcourt Village Voice, which is a zine dedicated to record the events occurred at the occupation taken place on Harcourt Road.

It was not until 2011 when Lai started to focus on painting and drawing as her main profession. A majority of her painted and drawn works portray anonymous figures intertwined with the surrounding settings which are sometimes identifiable, local spaces (e.g. the interior of a public bus, the walls inside an MTR station). Although these works display local specificities, she emphasized the possibility of going beyond such geographical confines when viewing her pieces, which can essentially be depicting anywhere and even anyone. She refers to her artworks as "figural works" in opposition to "portraitures", as the former term erases the particular identification of a protagonist, and underscores the universality and ambiguity of the subject. The gender of the figures she portrayed is often unknown. Her expressive and ambiguous figurative works perpetuate the duality of human experience as individual yet collective. While our personal emotions and thoughts are experienced internally, they can ultimately be shared and empathized among humans.

In 2007, she co-founded and operated the Hulahoop Gallery with Lulu Ngie (Chinese: 倪鷺露), an artist and fellow graduate from Hong Kong Arts School majoring in painting in 2006. The gallery was located at G/F, 23 Sau Wa Fong, St. Francis Street, Wanchai. However, it closed down by the end of 2009 with the farewell exhibition Lustfully Yours porno exhibition (November 20 - December 13, 2009).

She compiled her paintings and drawings into five published monographs, where she often wrote about the conception behind her own works. In her monograph Phototropism: Sketch and Drawing by Firenze Lai (2009), she discussed about the performativity of human faces. While human faces serve as bridges between an individual to the world, they might also become a barrier as faces may not always accurately express the internal thoughts of a person. Such ambiguity performed through human bodies about the are also conveyed in her artworks. Furthermore, her distorted figures imply an interconnection between one's body and mind, as well as the struggle of getting along with oneself. According to Lai:

In 2006, Lai graduated from Hong Kong Art School (HKAS), the education division of Hong Kong Arts Centre (HKAC), with a major in painting. During her years at HKAS, she would stay awake to draw throughout the night.

After graduating from Hong Kong Art School in 2006, she became a freelance editorial designer. She mainly designed books of Chinese literary works, including works by Lau Shiu Ming Joseph (劉紹銘愛讀散文系列), Sharon Zhong (春在綠蕪中, 2008 new edition), Chan Chi Tak (愔齋讀書錄), Pun Kwok Ling (愛琉璃, 無有紀年) and Tang Siu Wa (斑駁日常).

Since 2005, a year before her graduation, Lai began illustrating for a psychology column in Ming Pao Weekly on a regular basis. While professional illustrators are often challenged to depict a wide array of subjects including those which they are not familiar with, she found the requirements of the column aligning with her personal interests. She was later involved in other illustration works for print advertisements, books and magazines such as Muse.

Firenze Lai Ching Yin (Chinese: 黎清妍; born 1984) is an artist, an illustrator, an editorial designer and the co-founder of Hulahoop Gallery of Hong Kong. She is a graduate from the painting program of Hong Kong Art School (HKAS). Her works frequently depict anonymous figures as subjects, and explore the issues of psychological landscapes, the mind and body, human relationships, collectiveness, and social experiences and space. Her paintings were exhibited in various international locations including the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014), the 2015 New Museum Triennial, and the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), as well as different local venues such as Para Site and Tai Kwun Contemporary. Another medium that she worked closely with are sketches and drawings, which she compiled in several published monographs along with selections of her paintings. Her illustrations are also known to be featured regularly in Mao Pao Weekly.

Firenze Lai was born in 1984 in Hong Kong to a working-class family living in a public housing estate. Her family of six relied on her mother who worked at a snake soup restaurant to sustain financially. Lai recalled that her mother always had to disassemble toxin-containing snake meat with bare hands at work, which had left her with rough hands and "deformed, incomplete" fingers. This early observation on the uniqueness and abnormalities of human bodies was developed into an interest in studying figures.