YuChun Chen (b.1980, Changhua, Taiwan), now living in Tamsui. She received her M.F.A. from the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Fo Guang University. Her works are mainly oil paintings and film photography. She focused on themes of past memories, dreams and the continuity of time, traveling through the atmosphere of both the real and the imaginary.

Park Seo-Bo was a pivotal figure in Korean contemporary art and a founding member of the Dansaekhwa movement, which emerged in post-war Korea in the early 1970s and has since gained international recognition.
His signature series, 'Ecriture,' began in the late 1960s through the repetition of pencil lines drawn over wet monochromatic surfaces. Over time, he expanded this language by incorporating hanji (traditional Korean paper) and color, creating works through layered actions of pasting, scraping, scratching, and rubbing — a meditative pursuit of emptiness through reduction.
Park's work has been exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale, Tate Liverpool, Brooklyn Museum, and Samsung Museum of Art. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, M+, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.

Woojoo’s paintings unfold into serene worlds filled with a sense of healing and tranquility. The recurring image of the “door” serves as a passage between reality and a realm beyond it, inviting viewers to imagine an experience that transcends familiar boundaries of time and space. Landscapes composed of forests, skies, clouds, and light evoke a sense of anticipation and wonder toward an unseen yet distinctly present world beyond reality. Through these dreamlike scenes, Woojoo creates a quiet refuge where viewers can momentarily step away from everyday life, encounter their inner emotions, and simply pause.

I am constantly in search of people and places that bring me a sense of stability. In life, I am always confronted with certain thresholds where I long for steadiness. At those boundaries, I find myself seeking environments and situations that help me maintain a calm emotional state. Most of these are familiar to me: my family, my home, my room, and the surroundings that have held me for a long time. When I ask myself where the process of being filled and forming a sense of self first began, I cannot leave out home and family. I hold close to my heart the softness and warmth of these things, and the precious moments at home where I can express my feelings honestly. In doing so, I try to preserve a quiet emotional balance. It was only natural, then, that the act of painting and the choice of what to paint began with what was closest to me. As I step into the home and room marked by my own traces, I find myself covering over the unstable emotions I could not express outside, and recovering a sense of calm and peace. I capture in my paintings the blue wallpaper close to my body, the scattered blue clothes, the blue blankets and pillows—objects that bear the touch of my hand. Along with them, I try to hold within the painting the tactile sensations of these things against the skin, as well as the emotions of those moments: the comfort, warmth, and tenderness that arise from familiarity.

The feeling of fur brushing between my toes,
the rush of air when my father lifts the blanket high and lets it fall while I am lying down,
the snug warmth of tucking the blanket tightly around my body,
the feeling of touching the cool temperature that has settled into the pillow because of the wind outside,
the soft texture of an old blanket worn thin with holes,
a pair of socks turned inside out on the floor,
the faint sunlight slipping through the blinds,
the sunlight and brightness that reach me as I lie down,
the moon visible through the window before sleep...

I gather these emotions and sensations from my own place and wrap them together, trying to paint their atmosphere and energy. In the process of expression, the act of applying materials softly onto hanji, or tearing its surface to reveal its delicate fibres, has itself become a process through which I find emotional calm. Through the repeated gestures of laying down thick layers of paint and scraping them away, or raising the surface of the hanji, I attempt to convey indirectly a kind of fluffy, tender warmth even through the material surface itself.
Ultimately, I hope that a painting, shaped by the attitude revealed in both the subject I look at and the process of making, can become a bearer of warmth—something held close at one’s side—and that the scope of this warmth may gradually expand.

Raised by her grandmother in a small village surrounded by tangerine fields, without her parents, she had to be endlessly good to survive. Drawing was a luxury. Still, unable to suppress the urge to create, she ran away to the mainland at seventeen.

Painting every day without fail to make a living, she gradually built a life as an artist, until she faced an irony: despite everything she had painted, not a single piece could truly be called "her own."

The paintings she eventually came to make as "her own" now hold deeply personal emotions and experiences. She finds solace by depicting quiet moments that contrast with overwhelming loneliness, returning again and again to the Jeju she once fled.

For Seoyeon, the canvas resembles a refuge. Among towering trees guarding a field that had turned green after giving away its yellow fruit, an abandoned container once stood. Squeezed into that cramped space, she felt, as a child, a complete sense of rest. Though that quiet refuge has scattered with time, her need for peace never left. After much wandering, her brushstrokes layered and soaked into the canvas, until a soft, dreamlike texture emerged, carrying her back to that place once more.

Heejae Lim visualizes situations infused with the desire to touch and possess the essence of ‘Nature’. 
The subjects she deals with, much like the taxidermies in a natural history museum, assume nature to be complete and vivid. In this regard, she discovers a resemblance between the human desire for nature and her own desire for image as a painter. She visualizes the connection between those two dilemmas by focusing on the surfaces that mediate these desires rather than the direct subjects, creating a peculiar texture and depth in her work. Her major solo exhibitions include "Nesting" (Space ONSU, 2023) and "Cabinet of Curiosity" (Lee Eugean Gallery, 2022). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as "Bright Room" (Every Art, 2023), "Inflating World" (Drawing Room, 2020), and "COCOON 2020" (Space K, 2020).


Standing before the paintings of Yoon Hyejin (b. 1992), we come face to face with eyes that have learned not to see clearly, but to endure. The forms on the canvas refuse to become distinct objects, revealing themselves only through blurred contours. The world the artist has painted is a landscape of memory discovered within the phenomenon of 'death' — brought to her by the prolonged illness of a beloved companion animal and the loss of her maternal grandfather. Landscapes that, being too close to the artist herself, could never resolve into clear views.

Yoon builds her surfaces by layering planes and masses of color. Bleeding and seeping layers accumulate in place of sharp lines, and from this process colors emerge that seem to have simply arrived at what they are. In the new works presented in ≪Fading, Rising≫, colors of the in-between appear frequently — violet yet not quite violet, brown yet not quite brown, colors where beginning and end cannot be told apart. These are the colors of a neutrality between two contrasting hours, the color that belongs to the moment just before an outcome is faced; and at the same time, they are colors built up by the heart and time that refused to let go, all the way to that hour of dawn.

In her previous solo exhibition, the artist likened the event of loss to a blazing sun — not the hopeful symbolism commonly ascribed to sunlight, but the sheer overwhelming force of the sun's existence itself: the helplessness of being undone before something that burns so intensely. The dynamism of a life struggling between living and dying had taken up residence in that sun. She rendered the lingering traces of time spent together — seen through blurred eyes, looking at the objects left behind by those who had gone — as landscapes where planes and masses of color bloom and spread. And those landscapes were her best effort as one who remains, an attempt to meet grief with wisdom.

Through this blurred gaze and act of distancing, Yoon Hyejin rendered an immense and sudden loss as a vast landscape. And at last, having passed through the time of that blazing sun, she has arrived at the hour between night and morning — the crossing into new time. She stands at the midpoint between the tempest in which grief bears down like a wall before one's eyes and the life that continues beyond it, the hours of arriving life. The canvases of *Fading, Rising | 저물며 떠오르며*, suffused with that violet hour, are landscapes — blurred yet firm — drawn up by eyes that gaze upon the threshold between presence and absence.

This work begins from the wall that individuals inevitably confront while living in reality. The feeling of wanting to do something for someone, yet realizing that there is almost nothing one can actually do, generates a sense of frustration that takes the form of longing. However, this longing does not function as consolation; instead, it remains as a persistent irritation, scratching at a corner of the mind.

This longing cannot be grasped. It feels too distant, approaching as an illusion seemingly unrelated to oneself. And yet, the act of wishing—like clinging to someone’s pant leg—offers no comfort. There is an unease, as if one is yearning for something that should not be desired. This contradictory state forms the emotional point of departure for the work.

This feeling recalls a scene from the film Parasite, in which the protagonist imagines that one day he will buy the house and reunite with his father. That desire is less a form of hope than a fantasy rendered all the more tragic by its distance from reality. This work remains within precisely such a state of “answerless longing.”

The project focuses on the imagery of talismans believed to ward off misfortune and invite good fortune. Traditional auspicious symbols such as the Seven-Star Horse, the three-legged crow, and the pig appear through repetitive stitching and drawing. Yet these images do not promise protection or comfort; rather, they resemble gestures of excessive desperation. They are less acts of faith than attempts to forcibly grasp and summon something at all costs.

The accumulated labor of the hand on soft, fragile materials fixes longing into material form, but the belief that it might actually be effective never reaches completion. This work is not an act of praying for fortune, but a revelation of the state of being compelled to long for it.
What scratches is not the surface, but the mind.

A world layered in light, the rhythm of time, and inner strata
Jian Yoo’s work delicately captures traces of life, materiality, and time within a rhythm that is both quiet and alive. Composed of thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—of points, lines, and planes of light, each piece flows across the surface, revealing an inner landscape shaped by time, experience, and environment.
Intangible layers of sensation emerge through the grain of light, moving ceaselessly toward the depths of the self. Mother-of-pearl, a recurring material in Yoo’s practice, serves as a quiet mediator between the natural world and the realm of consciousness—revealing the structure of being through a language of light.
“Exploring the nature of my materials is like looking inward. Within the flows of time and relationships that surround me, I translate quiet yet dynamic energy into fragments of light.”
The waves that ripple across the surface invite viewers to encounter the texture of perception and traces of time. Moving between material and immaterial, tradition and contemporaneity, the work visualizes the rhythm of the unseen—gently touching the viewer’s inner world and awakening forgotten layers of sensation.

Mira Park (b.1982) navigates the space between consciousness and the unconscious, constructing layered compositions grounded in black. Her works depict surreal combinations of humans, animals, plants, and objects—grotesque, unstable entities that seem to move independently within the frame. These forms suggest stories, yet deliberately resist any fixed narrative. Through recurring motifs like holes, doors, and windows, she blurs the boundary between the real and the virtual, hinting at the possibility of other dimensions. Horn-like forms—recalling tentacles, branches, or hands—suggest fluid mobility and a sense of continuous dimensional shift, pulling the viewer into the unknown.

River City Bangkok, in collaboration with the Embassy of Mexico in Thailand, presents “Unportraited”, a solo exhibition by the renowned Mexican artist Diego Rodarte. Known for his experimental and boundary-pushing painting practice, Rodarte brings to Bangkok a provocative new body of work that reimagines portraiture for the contemporary gaze.

Jiho Kim paints what is present but rarely looked at — queerness, women, violence:
things that sit plainly within society yet go unmentioned, or are addressed only
within a fixed frame. The artist describes the work not as healing but as digestion.
A sore muscle only loosens if you keep pressing on it, and painting is much the same:
a return, again and again, to the uncomfortable places usually left alone.
The starting point is always personal experience. Painting something unrelated,
something that stirs no feeling, leaves the artist doubtful of the work. So the first
stage is to retrieve the emotions pushed into a corner and left unexamined, and to
fold and sort them. One is chosen — whichever feels most urgent — and turned over for
weeks until a scene surfaces in the mind like a film still. It passes through sketch
and photograph before reaching the canvas.
The surface is built from many thin layers of oil, blended and rebuilt until a colour
that reads as flat from across the room reveals faint shifts up close — the way skin
does. This is what draws Kim to the figure, and why the canvases are large. What the
work asks for is time: not to be passed by, but stood in front of, approached, and
found to hold something new on each looking. Nothing changes, Kim says, unless it is
brought out.

Ndayé Kouagou (1992) is an artist and performer based in Paris; his practice begins with text, which is expanded upon through performance, film, textiles, sculpture and installation. Kouagou manipulates the reduced language of aphorism and aesthetics on which the digital landscape of TikTok and Instagram is built, creating immersive environments that both confront and seduce the viewer. Using screens, plexiglass, resin and aluminium, Kouagou presents the viewer with elliptical statements and open-ended, existentially leading questions, simulating a meandering dialogue that borrows from the language of online influencers and self-help. Surface and depth, humour and sincerity, clarity and confusion are granted equivalent significance in Kouagou’s work as he playfully explores the forms and effects of mediated communication.

JuAe Park presents works in this exhibition that take the body itself as material. At the intersection of mural labor and artistic practice, the work documents acts of applying paint directly and rolling across the floor as panoramic images.

Renowned for his use of exaggerated anatomical forms and a vibrant spectrum of colors, Lee Hongmin builds his practice upon the narrative of his own life, drawing inspiration from the animations and comics embedded in his memory. Growing up in a somewhat authoritarian environment, the artist found in animation a realm of fantasy—one that playfully subverted the taboos of reality. Through the language of comics, Lee sought to break free from the pressures of Korea’s standardized education system and the constraints of traditional culture, challenging the authority around him and envisioning an imagined world unbound by social prohibitions.

Lee’s practice centers on the emotion of anger, exploring its primal force and the questions that emerge in its aftermath. Paradoxically, his works radiate a strange purity amid their explosive energy—a quality born from his profound contemplation of rage and the sincerity of his expression. Since his debut solo exhibition in 2015, Lee Hongmin has continued to present raw, unfiltered manifestations of anger to the public through dynamic solo shows at Gallery Stan and, most notably, his 2020 debut at Christie’s.

Xooang Choi(b. 1975) has been creating works that unfold various phenomena arising in the relationship between individuals and society through realistic depictions of the human body. His works possess the power to evoke tactile sensations that resonate thoroughly with viewers’ hearts, prompting them to reflect on the world they live in and the situations they find themselves in. In the recent works, Choi examines the process of actively embracing various intermediate parameters within the artwork, moving away from a subjective position of making sculptural decisions to expand concepts and forms encompassing regions, histories, places, and memories.

He has held solo and group exhibitions at prestigious galleries and museums both domestically and internationally, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Sungkok Art Museum; Gwangju Biennale; Changwon Sculpture Biennale; Yeosu International Art Festival; Doosan Gallery Seoul and New York; Hakgojae Gallery; Gallery SP; Space So; Yoon Seon Gallery; Musee d'Ansembroug (Belgium); Art Seasons gallery (Singapore); National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Moscow, Russia); Vestfossen Museum (Norway); Brandts Museum (Denmark); Jewish Museum (Berlin, Germany); Galerie Albert Benamou (Paris, France); Musée de la Halle St Pierre (Paris, France); Fine Art Gallery of Luxun National Institute (Shen Yang, China), among others.

While painting, LIM Nosik’s (b. 1989) body is embedded in everyday scenes. However, the psychological distance from which he looks at it is either closer or further than ordinary days. The subject of his recent work is a question about how to sense landscapes. It focuses on the individual's response to it as much as on the characteristics of the physical properties of a place. The Workroom (2023) is a series of paintings of the studio desk viewed from different times and directions, almost life-sized. The foggy, blurred screen depicts the appearance of weathered memories over time. It is an attempt to capture the world vibrating in the distance of time and space by visualizing the layer of air placed between the landscape, canvas, and himself.




LIM Nosik was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1989. He received his BFA in Oriental Painting at Hongik University in 2015, and MFA in Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts at Korea National University of Arts in 2017. He has held solo exhibitions at various institutions such as Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Project Space SARUBIA (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Window Gallery, Incheon Art Platform (Incheon, Korea, 2020), Artspace Boan 2 (Seoul, Korea, 2020) and Hapjungjigu (Seoul, Korea, 2017), as well as group exhibitions held at ARARIOGALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2024), SongEun (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Art Center White Block (Seoul, Korea, 2022), SFAC Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (Seoul, Korea, 2021), Amado Art Space (Seoul, Korea, 2020), and more. The artist gained attention for being selected in the Kumho Museum of Art and Kumho Young Artist 2022. He was the artist-in-residence at the SeMA Nanji Residency (Seoul, Korea) in 2019, and also was the artist-in-residence at the SFAC Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (Seoul, Korea) in 2021. His works are collected by institutions such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Art Bank, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ilmin Museum of Art, and more.

Abdessemed is a conceptual artist who works in a range of media including drawing, video, photography, performance, and sculpture, and collaborates with creators from many fields, from poetry to dance and architecture. He manipulates familiar materials and images to create provocative and often violent works influenced by his exposure to the Gulf War and its global impact. Drawing on personal, political, and historical narratives, the artist believes that his art “is a confrontation that leads to a break with the norm and is accompanied by extreme anger,” but that his work is simultaneously  “…actually positive. The world is violent – not me".
Abdessemed’s work has been presented at four Venice Biennales (2003, 2007, 2011, 2015), where he received the Benesse Prize in 2007.  He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at major institutions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, the San Francisco Art Institute, MoMA PS1, and the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Geneva. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musée national d’art moderne Georges-Pompidou, Paris, the Collection Budi Tek, Shanghai, and the Fondation François Pinault, Venice, among others.

For almost forty years, Heri Dono has developed a fantastical world of dichotomies in his paintings. Humorously juxtaposing reality with imagination, folk with contemporary art, politics with fiction, the tension between these opposing forces create narratives that cut across a complex, multi-layered system of ideologies. Having lived through the struggle against oppression by the Indonesian regime in the 1980s, and later the ‘reformasi’ in 1998 that spawned from the end of Suharto’s regime and developed into the neo-liberal globalization of Indonesia as it is today, Heri Dono’s artistic methodology re-examines power structures through satirical illustrations of humans versus the Other, man versus machine, offering a kind of passage for others to survive real life transitions during challenging times. 
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He is known for his uniquely contemporary, Javanese style inspired by traditional Wayang Kulit (puppet theatre). Through his construction of thoughtful layers in his work, he is able to emphasize the more serious, underlying reflections on and criticisms of social and political issues such as military intervention, political corruption, and environmental destruction, allowing easier engagement with often difficult concepts. 
 
Heri Dono participated in no less than 31 international biennales. His works have been widely exhibited, including at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2015, the Gwangju Biennale in 1995 and 2006, the Singapore Art Museum, the National Gallery of Indonesia in Jakarta, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France, and Asia Society New York, among others. His works are in the collections of the Deutsche Guggenheim in Frankfurt, the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan, the Singapore Art Museum, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. Award winners of the Prince Claus Award for Culture and Development (1998), the Unesco Prize in 2000, and the Anugerah Adhikarya Rupa (Arts Award) from the Indonesian Government in 2014.

Exploring the intersection of reality and fantasy, Jung Woo Jae's emotionally charged artworks delve into the desires and struggles of modern individuals. His recurring motif of the adolescent girl symbolizes the poignant journey of self-discovery and the pursuit of self-esteem in the throes of adulthood. Often depicted as pets, animals emerge as beacons of healing and comfort, offering solace in the face of modern anxieties and the isolating tendencies of individualistic societies. By grounding his fantastical elements within meticulously rendered landscapes and luminous light effects, Jung Woo Jae masterfully blurs the lines between reality and imagination, inviting the viewer to participate in a relatable emotional journey. Through his hyperrealistic techniques, he imbues his art with a potent message of "healing and recovery," offering a comforting presence and a sense of hope to those navigating the uncertainties of modern life.

Hyuck Jin Oh (b.1997) is a rising Korean artist whose work delves into the emotional complexity of the human experience. His distinctive approach to mixed media combines different materials with traditional pigments, creating textured, layered compositions that convey the emotional depth and warmth of life’s spectrum. Oh's art explores themes of healing, transformation, and inner balance, reflecting both the turmoil and tranquility that shape the human condition. Through his work, he captures moments of emotional struggle while offering a sense of peace—emphasizing that even in times of hardship, there is potential for personal growth and renewal.

In addition to his fine art practice, Oh actively collaborates with the music and media industries, contributing his visual work to album covers, films, and dramas. This interdisciplinary approach expands his creative reach, deepening his exploration of emotional landscapes. His exhibition in Bangkok marked an important step in his growing international presence, further establishing his unique voice in the global art scene. Through his art, Oh invites viewers to reflect on their own emotional journeys, offering a message of hope and transformation—that by confronting and overcoming adversity, one can make positive memories shine even brighter.

Artists