TAIEPEI DANGDAI 2025

May 8-11, Nangang Exhibition Center

We are very pleased to share that we will be participating in Taipei Dangdai 2025, from May 8th through the 11th at the Nangang Exhibition Center in Taipei, Taiwan. We are excited to present a vivid collection of works by four international artists: Gary Armer, Jaeyi Kim, Oscar Oiwa, and Zhou Song. Each exploring the existential struggle of navigating modern life through their diverse cultural lenses and artistic practices. Our presentation interrogates the dissonance between societal expectations and individual fulfillment, using art and creative practice as a conduit for provoking reflection and dialog.

Gary Armer

In a world of constant motion and fleeting moments, my paintings capture the beauty of organized chaos; carefully curated, deeply personal, and endlessly immersive. Through intricate arrangements of objects, I explore escapism and nostalgia, inviting viewers to lose themselves in the details, rediscovering fragments of memory and meaning with each glance.

At the heart of my work is a fascination with balance. While I deliberately break compositional rules, eschewing a single focal point in favor of layered complexity, each piece is meticulously arranged to create harmony within disorder. The interplay of light, form, and depth transforms the everyday into something extraordinary, elevating familiar objects beyond their material presence.

My subjects, often childhood relics, mass-produced yet deeply sentimental, act as vessels of personal history. They are not merely painted representations but portals into collective memory, reflections of identity shaped by time. The hyper-real rendering enhances this connection, grounding fantasy in authenticity and allowing the viewer to step into a world both tangible and dreamlike.

Ultimately, my work is about seeing; looking beyond the surface, finding beauty in the overlooked, and appreciating the mastery of time and craft. In an era of speed and impermanence, I believe some things are meant to be unrushed, to demand attention, to reward patience. My paintings invite stillness, reflection, and a moment of wonder in the midst of life’s relentless movement.

In the back of my mind, I am wary that we are only on this planet for a short length of time, and there’s a finite amount of things I can create from an art point of view, so I feel like if I’m not at the easel pushing things forward, I’m not creating, and I’m not improving.

Jaeyi Kim

My work is a conversation between presence and absence, construction and dissolution. Each painting is a moment suspended in time; figures caught between transformation and stillness, spaces that shift between reality and dream. I build my images in layers, letting colors and forms emerge organically, then obscuring or altering them, as if testing the boundaries of memory and identity.

I am drawn to the tension between concealment and revelation. My figures exist within theatrical spaces; stages, curtains, frames; where they are both performers and captives. Sometimes they watch from the edges, other times they take center stage, though the role they play is never quite clear. I use recurring symbols to hint at unseen forces: a crown that suggests both power and weight, a staircase leading somewhere just beyond reach, a ribbon holding something fragile together.

Narrative is always present in my work, though it resists easy interpretation. The characters I paint seem to inhabit their own fable-like worlds, where the rules are unspoken, but deeply felt. A small dog with painted stripes is momentarily something else, perhaps freer, perhaps just more lost. A masked figure reaches toward an unseen threshold. There is movement, but where it leads is uncertain.

Painting, for me, is an act of excavation as much as creation. I often cover, erase, and repaint, allowing past versions to linger beneath the surface. This process mirrors the way we construct and reconstruct our own identities over time; adding, discarding, forgetting, and rediscovering.

Rather than offering conclusions, my work lingers in the in-between, in the act of becoming. It is an invitation to pause in that space, to notice what is shifting, and to ask what remains.

Oscar Oiwa

As a second-generation Japanese-Brazilian artist, my work embodies a synthesis of diverse cultural influences and personal experiences. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1965 to Japanese parents, I was immersed in a rich tapestry of Brazilian vibrancy and Japanese tradition. This unique upbringing has profoundly shaped my artistic vision, allowing me to traverse and blend various cultural landscapes.

Reflecting on my artistic roots and the technological advances that have transformed the world, I recall:

"One day, sitting in my studio chair, I was thinking about my past, my childhood memories, and my notion of the world from my fourth-floor apartment window. Googling, I found my childhood apartment; the building is still there! In my childhood, I looked at the world from my window. Now, I can see the same window from the world, and in my imagination, the little boy standing behind it."

This interplay of perspective, time, and memory informs much of my work. After graduating from the Department of Architecture at the University of São Paulo in 1989, I sought to broaden my horizons by relocating to Tokyo, where I was based from 1991 to 2001. Since 2002, I have been living and working in New York City, a place where the possibilities for contemporary artists are infinite but also fraught with risk. To live in New York is the dream of many, but being an artist overseas means living without institutional protection, constantly adapting, surviving, and creating anew.

My artistic journey is driven by a continuous exploration of new ideas and perspectives. I believe that without opening new doors, new ideas won't come to me. This philosophy propels me to experiment with various mediums and themes, ensuring that my work remains dynamic and evolving. One recurring motif in my art is the interplay between light and shadow—a theme that found its way into my work through real-life observations.

Long ago, upon landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, I saw hundreds of wild rabbits scattered across the runway at sunset. The horizontal light made the scene mesmerizing, as the rabbits leaped from shadow into brightness. This moment inspired my creation of the "Light Rabbit." In contrast, living in downtown Tokyo, I watched stray cats move silently along the walls between houses as night fell. These cats became the muse for my "Shadow Cat," representing the absence of light. "Light Rabbit and Shadow Cat" embody this timeless theme in painting—the contrast between presence and absence, illumination and obscurity.

The urban environment also serves as a significant source of inspiration in my work. I often depict cityscapes that blend reality with imagination, offering a bird's-eye view that invites viewers to see the familiar from a new perspective. In 2001, I painted a pair of masterpieces, "War and Peace," depicting the pre-war and wartime appearance of Kita-Senju, Tokyo, as contrasting day and night scenes. The following year, I moved to New York after witnessing the destruction of 9/11. My studio, across the East River from Manhattan, has since been the base for my creative endeavors, connecting my memories, fantasies, and reflections on time and history.

In recent years, my work has evolved to incorporate multiple layers of time within a single painting. Inspired by the notion that time does not always progress linearly but rather swirls, stagnates, and returns, I have been collaging landscapes from past works to create new compositions. A river often flows through these pieces, symbolizing the passage of time and connection between places. Similarly, my installation projects, such as those created for the Setouchi Triennale and the Taiwan Lantern Festival, extend this exploration into immersive environments, where light, space, and memory converge.

Throughout my adult life, I have dedicated myself to creating artistic works, each representing a particular theme or idea that has inspired me. Over time, these works contribute to the gradual construction of my own visual world—a rich tapestry of images and ideas woven together in a continuous ring. Looking at my past paintings, I remember the trial and error of those moments, the techniques I developed, and the thoughts I explored. That trajectory becomes the foundation for my new work, a perpetual process of rediscovery and reinvention.

In this digital age, painting remains a slow, contemplative process, an "awful" choice commercially, yet one that has endured through history. I believe that works are like seeds; they do not reach completion upon exhibition. Instead, that is where their journey truly begins. As an artist, I resist the linearization of personal and social history by depicting vague memories, unwritten histories, and the fluid interplay of time and place. Through my work, I strive to create a world of polyphonic and dissonant melodies, where past and future coexist, and where viewers are invited to navigate their own experiences of memory, light, and transformation.

Zhou Song

My work embarks on a journey to explore the enigmatic realms of "New Nature", a world that encapsulates the present and future existential challenges of humanity. In Chinese philosophy, the concept of "nature" diverges significantly from its Western meaning. Western thought tends to be anthropocentric, distinctly separating the subjective from the objective and treating humans and nature as mutually exclusive entities. Humans are understood as cognitive subject, with nature the object of cognition. This narrow view of nature has today become prevalent and dominant. However, in Eastern philosophy, the concept of nature is far more inclusive, encompassing everything from humans, society, to realms of tangible and intangible knowledge. As stated in the "Zhouyi • Xici Xia," nature covers the ways of heaven, humanity, and earth, existing as the unity of these three foundations. The term "Laozi" emphasizes the harmonious unity between humans and nature: "Four primary domains exist, and humans occupy one of them. Humans follow the Earth, Earth follows Heaven, Heaven follows the Dao, and the Dao follows nature."

This distinct understanding of "nature" has shaped the differences in thought, values, cultural traditions, and religious beliefs between the East and West. The "I Ching" is not only the origin of Eastern epistemologies of nature, but also profoundly impacts Chinese and Eastern philosophy and culture. Traditional Chinese landscape painting, which often conceives of "trees" as a spiritual conduit, captures the essence of Chinese philosophy. The relationship between "landscape" and "trees" demonstrates the simplicity of Chinese natural philosophy. Operating within this intellectual and cultural tradition, my work reinterprets the relationship between "trees" and "landscape". It employs deconstructive and reconstructive artistic methods and incorporating elements such as "humans" and "pencils" to construct a "new natural" landscape. In this transformed landscape, "they" (humans, pencils, trees, and all entities as microcosms of nature) coexist interdependently, inter-connectedly, and influentially, forming an organic whole, a fragment and unified process of cosmic evolution.

Today, we are immersed in a new natural world shaped by modern theories of civilization such as the multiverse, string theory, quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, and genetics. The entangled and twisted pencils in my paintings not only point to the heights of human knowledge and achievement. Like the tremendous flow of information in the internet era, these objects display the complexity of new knowledge in the development of this new nature. Furthermore, these twisted pencils symbolize Al intelligence and futuristic cyber-technologies, yet not in terms of how artificial and human knowledge collide. The anthropomorphic "pencil trees" reflect a paradoxical unnatural and living state of being, suggesting that they're suffused with a sense of mechanical intelligence.

In my work, I integrate human elements within the frame, blending bodily and behavioral references with various objects like "trees" and "pencils" to delineate the mystical landscape of "New Nature”. This landscape transcends traditional frameworks; in contrast to simple Eastern philosophy rooted in China's agrarian civilization, it represents a philosophical essence and more broadly references Chinese art and culture, embodying a "new Nature" and "new world" formed by human evolution and technological transformation. This new world reflects deep philosophical contemplations of how technology, culture, society can reflect a new cosmological perspective, both today and in the future. My new work builds on traditional Chinese philosophy, presenting a new interpretation of its key tenets through deconstruction, reconstruction, and innovation. It depicts a "New Natural Landscape" of the contemporary world, aiming to explore and reflect on the existential challenges humanity faces and will continue to confront.