Michael Lye (2001, Narrm/Melbourne) is an Malaysian-Australian Artist currently based in London, UK. Lye’s practice researches the social and metaphysical implication of ‘spatiality’ within the framework of an existentialist or active-nihilistic reality. His sculptural spaces are founded upon the interplay of industrial lead hard materiality and their structures' modular and entropic nature. This juxtaposing dialogue alongside a constant navigation between control and hostile violent forms aims at pointing to the benign social and physical constraints that obstruct individual agency within architectural, metaphysical and political spaces. 

Lye’s objects, though minimalist in form, intentionally lack the hyper-industrialised processes that typify the movement's ideas, instead Lye highlights the object's mode of creation, progressing the formative ideas set out by Frank Stella who said ‘What you see is what you see’. Lye pushes this narrative further by referring to what Aristotle calls ‘substantia’, or the object as having  independent existence. Often Lye’s objects are intentionally and unintentionally marked with physical scratches, variant dimensions, stains and uneven surface textures.  In releasing the constraints of the object from human control, the objects become a part of this physical reality and inherently introduces time as a secondary medium in all his works. This entropic nature feeds into Lye’s overarching existentialist themes, and to what he believes as the ‘imperfectly perfect’ being of all things. 

Lye is currently completing his MA in Contemporary Art Practice at  Royal College of Art, London, UK. He is a recipient of the RCA Presidents and Vice-Chancellors International Scholarship for the 2025/26 study year.