Time: 20 August-14 September, 2025
Location: Gallery 2
Curatorial Foreword
The phrase “a false awakening” refers to a liminal state of mind—a moment when fragments of a dream still linger, and consciousness has yet to fully reassemble. The self hovers between wakefulness and sleep, suspended in a zone of psychic indeterminacy. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed that dreams serve as portals into the collective unconscious, and that artists often become its vessels or conduits. The collective unconscious, as he theorized, is a deep reservoir of archetypes—primordial forms rooted in the architecture of the human psyche, transcending individual experiences. These archetypes manifest in dreams, myths, and works of art. For Jung, symbols are not fixed signs but dynamic psychological schemata, thresholds to more profound layers of perception.
The title A False Awakening does not point to a singular experience but gestures toward a recurring psychic condition.
Painting, among the most ancient of artistic languages, has long evolved through systems of representation: from pictographs to perspective, from symbolic imagery to abstraction. Across centuries, it has been ruptured, reconfigured, and reimagined. Modernism in the twentieth century further accelerated painting’s self-deconstruction: Cézanne's revision of vision, Abstract Expressionism’s investment in bodily gesture, Minimalism’s reduction of form to its brink. Painting seemed to reach a point of exhaustion, or perhaps completion.
Yet in the present, painting finds itself in a newly reconfigured terrain. The rise of artificial intelligence and generative algorithms has rendered image production instant, infinite, and untethered, as a single line of text can yield endless visual permutations. In an era marked by visual saturation and rapid technological upgrade, the emergence of genuinely new forms becomes rare. Paradoxically, this crisis of novelty compels a return to older, more obstinate visual practices. Painting is no longer merely representational; it is a sustained inquiry into perception itself. With its slowness, material presence, and irreproducibility, painting regains a quiet resilience—a psychic density capable of registering complex inner experiences while resisting algorithmic abstraction.
This exhibition gathers ten artists born between the 1980s and 2000s, working across supports such as wood panel, canvas, silk, and paper, and employing mediums including tempera, oil, acrylic, airbrush, ink, and pen. Whether figurative or abstract, the works share a common ground as they traverse the substratum of the unconscious. Here, painting approaches a shamanistic gesture—it does not assert conclusions but conjures presences that are half-sensed, as yet unformed. This may be why painting continues to matter today: it offers a fragile, flickering vessel for those aspects of human experience that cannot be simulated, replicated, or replaced by new technology.
As viewers enter the exhibition, they may find within a wash of color or the shimmer of shadow an echo of an unfinished dream, a momentary lapse in focus, or a whisper left unsaid. These images ask us to pause, to re-attune our perception, to allow our shifting consciousness to brush against that of others in a shared space of encounter.
Perhaps painting has never stood so close to the threshold between illusion and lucidity. May this exhibition serves as a passage—one that, in an age of informational glut and perceptual numbness, allows each of us to encounter our own false awakening: a dream still unfolding, a consciousness still in the making.
— Euphie Ying
August 1, 2025
New York
Selected Exhibits:
