Lai Chiu-Chen

“Bubble Limited Company,” the title of Lai Chiu-Chen’s solo exhibition, refers to a fictional soap-bubble company of which the artist is the make-believe president. It’s a conceit that nicely captures the buoyant authority, the playfulness and pop, that his show exudes. In the eighteen large acrylic paintings here, Lai has placed anime characters amid abstract patterns to riff on geometric abstraction and Pop art, enlisting not only iconic Western cartoons, including Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and Casper the Friendly Ghost, but also Japanese mascots such as Slime, a teardrop character from the Dragon Quest video game series. Some of the canvases clearly allude to modernist experimenters Josef Albers and René Magritte, while others make use of floral patterns and landscapes that intrude as cutouts, usually in the corners of the frames. Concrete tetrapods—staples of harbors in Taiwan and Japan—also appear.

In Snow White Wants to Sneak Away to the Beach, 2018, the titular subject peers emptily with big blue eyes through a mat, cage-like grid whose bottom-right corner affords a view of a tranquil seascape. This caustic spirit lingers in Mr. and Ms. Animals Who Live in the Congregate Housing, 2016-17, which portrays bright toy animals tucked into cubbyholes. These ebullient mashups evoke the collective cultural memory of a globalized world in which Pop art, geometric abstraction, and Asian and non-Asian cultures overlap and refract, and blend into one another. And as this show’s bubble business premise suggests, these influences are most readily consumable as foamy commodities, shiny and hollow yet sometimes, as in Lai’s paintings, plenty absorbing.