Fluid Places

Ya-Chin Cheng Yen Yen-Jui Lai Homer Shew Motohide Takami

Seizan Gallery New York is pleased to present Fluid Places a group exhibition of four artists.

In bringing together emerging artists of different backgrounds yet who all share important ties to East Asia, the show surveys the diverse contemporary voices of this community. The intention and hope is to stimulate dialogue among the artists and the viewers of their work.

Ya-Chin Chang was born in Hong Kong in 1985. Having previously worked in business, she then chose to pursue art and studied traditional drawing and painting methods at ateliers in Florence, Paris and New York City. Chang now divides her time between Hong Kong and New York. She sets up playful scenes and dioramas of random objects found in her life as subjects of her paintings. Executed in a classical “Western” painting style, Chang’s miniature worlds offer the viewer a nostalgic, dreamlike experience. Her works have been exhibited at Nathalie Karg (New York), Half Gallery (New York), The Armory Show (New York), and the Spring/Break Art Show (New York and Los Angeles).

Yen Yen-Jui Lai was born in Taichung, Taiwan in 1990. She completed her Master's degree in painting and drawing at Pratt Institute in New York, and eventually moved back to Taiwan. An important part of her practice are her daily line drawings. Lai creates drawings of minimal shapes in pencil and water color. The drawings sometimes evolve to become installation pieces with video and sound. While Lai’s works are delicate, dreamlike and whimsical, there is a sense of fear and menace underneath. “The process (of drawing) feels like a battle; after I finish the works, the fear still exists, but I can live with it,“ states the artist. Lai’s works have been shown in New York and in Taipei.

Homer Shew was born in Chicago in 1990, studied Visual Art at Bard College and lives and works in New York. He is committed to a life-long project of making painted portraits of Asian Americans living in the US. The subjects are often his friends and colleagues from art communities. As a Chinese American, Shew states that the aim of the project is to “re-aestheticize and de-caricaturize Asian faces.” Shew’s works have been exhibited at the Museum of Chinese in America (New York), Art Basel Hong Kong, Kiang Malingue Gallery (Hong Kong) and at many other venues.

Motohide Takami was born in 1986 in Ishikawa, in the northern part of Japan. While he was a graduate student of Tohoku University of Art in Yamagata, the Great Earthquake of 2011 occurred. The disaster and its aftermath had a dramatic impact on the subject matter of his oil paintings. One of his signature images, of flames by the riverside, refers to the Japanese expression, "fire on the other side of the river," meaning somebody else's business. It is Takami's ironic examination of human disinterest in tragic events which do not directly impact them. Takami’s paintings have been shown in Japan and in the US, including a solo exhibition in 2019 at Seizan Gallery New York.