The Daylight Moon

Francis Cai, The Moonlight Sea, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

Francis Cai

Gallery 1A

Friday 19 April - Sunday 12 May

Opening Thursday 18 April 2024, 6pm - 8pm

The Daylight Moon photography series conjures up a spacetime to accommodate unattainable and unchangeable elements in reality. In those hyperreal images, the exaggerated and uncanny scenes, unexpected relations and images between figures and objects can form complex and bizarre circumstances, terrestrial and ethereal, just like a fantasy flashing in our brain or a remote dream.

Francis worked with images and clips through a non-linear, fragmented sequence of visual excerpts from his adventures in Australia as an emerging artist from Shanghai, conjuring up an interrupted departure, obstructions, and emotional shortcuts, building up a fantasy world that could break the constraints of time and space. Utilising digital manipulation combined with black and white film negatives, here the imaginary being born out of a raw experience is also its forever-hedged condition of possibility. Like a short circuit, they navigate his mind along a hyperreal path, often producing dystopian associations while situating in a misty post-pandemic world, rushing towards the future with the past silently behind. This tension between the self and the societies, dreams and messy ordinary life, and the impure relationship between documentation and subjectivity is what The Daylight Moon series ultimately investigates.

Francis Cai in studio courtesy of Dr Zinnia Lo.

About the artist

 Francis Cai is a 25-year-old fine art photographer and an XR film director based in Sydney, Australia. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design and a Master of Moving Image degree from the University of Sydney. Upon graduation, he co-founded Studio 13 Sydney, attending residency programs in both New York City and France to extend his practice.

His recent images often focus on surreal landscapes and rising self-awareness in the post-pandemic era. As a young visual artist with a unique perspective in psychogeography, he sensitively examines the differences in diverse living environments and cultures in the uncertain time he experienced from the heart. 

Francis's works show a distinctive personal style and have been exhibited locally and internationally at Leo Kelly Art Centre, Verge Gallery, Beijing Time Museum, Shanghai National Convention Centre and ZheJiang Art Museum, gradually catching public attention. His artworks are in private and public collections.