White Cube previews Firenze Lai's North and True North at Mason's Yard on the evening of Tuesday 13 October 2026, six until eight, the Tuesday of Frieze week.
Firenze Lai was born in Hong Kong in 1984 and has spent two decades painting the psychological weather of a crowded city: figures compressed into carriages, waiting rooms and stairwells, their bodies bent by the spaces around them rather than by anything happening to them. The work is quiet, small in scale and unmistakable once seen. She joined White Cube in July 2025, and this is the first exhibition of her work anywhere in Britain.
North and True North shows new paintings made in her London studio over the past year, which makes it a record of an artist’s first sustained period in a different city. Mason’s Yard is the gallery’s St James’s building, opened in 2006 and small enough that a show of this kind is seen whole in one room rather than walked through.
The preview is on Tuesday 13 October 2026, six until eight, and the exhibition then runs to 14 November. It opens on the first day of Frieze, when every serious collector and curator in Europe is within a mile of the door. A first British show timed to that week is a considerable statement of intent by a gallery that has been introducing artists to London since 1993. The paintings on the walls were made a mile and a half away, in a London studio, by an artist who had never shown here before.