Ginnipishi For Art is the studio practice of Austin Lai (b. 2000), a Taiwanese American artist based in New York. Raised in Taipei, Austin’s love of art began with a drawing of an “automatic pineapple cake machine” that could produce pineapple cakes and deliver them directly to anyone who was hungry, a playful idea that already hinted at his fascination with systems, humor, and human behavior. While attending boarding school in London, he developed a deeper commitment to art; living away from home sharpened his sensitivity to displacement, memory, and the ways identity shifts across places and cultures. Drawn to both visual expression and analytical thinking, he went on to The Cooper Union, earning a degree in architecture with a minor in art history. Although he has no formal studio training in fine art, his practice is shaped by architectural precision and sustained observation of human behavior and emotion.

Austin is especially interested in facial expression and the uncertainty of contemporary life, where feelings can be fragile, shifting, and contradictory at once. His work brings architectural thinking into the realm of feeling, often holding multiple viewpoints within a single frame, like memory replayed from different angles. He constructs faces through edges, joints, and overlaps, then disrupts that structure until it becomes unstable and unmistakably human. His drawings invite a slower kind of looking—not to solve the image, but to notice what changes each time you return.