About the event
■ Duration｜2026 / 1 / 24 - 3 /14
■ Opening｜1 / 24 (Sat) 4 PM
■ Venue ｜RIVER ART GALLERY
■ Exhibiting Artists｜Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho, Penny Davenport, Ray Han, Shingo Yamazaki, Yi-Shuan Lee
RIVER ART GALLERY will present the group exhibition “Hippocampal Overflow”, featuring artists from various cultural and generational backgrounds: Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho, a Cantonese and Japanese American artist; British artist Penny Davenport; Taiwanese artist Ray Han; Japanese and Korean American artist Shingo Yamazaki, and Taiwanese Canadian artist Yi-Shuan Lee. The exhibition weaves a contemporary allegory about memory failure, sensory overload, and self-settlement, presenting a diagnosis of the era.
The term “Hippocampal” originates from hippocampus, a critical component of the human brain responsible for linking memory, emotion, and spatial perception. Nowadays, this system of memory and emotion is under unprecedented strain. From the tariff trade war that sent shockwaves around the globe, the conflicts and security crises, the shifts in East Asian geopolitics, to the AI economic frenzy and social media regulations, last but not least, the attack at the end of the year that profoundly shook Taiwan's society. All of these point to a common and urgent reality: when the hippocampus becomes overloaded, short-term memory fails to consolidate into long-term storage, the subconscious begins to lose order, and the boundary between reality and imagination blurs—fantasy no longer functions as escape; it overflows into reality, mirroring the conditions of everyday life.
In the exhibition, the artists respond to this psychological state shaped by an excess reality through distinct yet resonant practices. Some revisit childhood and mythology to mend fractured layers of collective imagination; others reflect human vulnerability and contradiction through encounters with animals and the natural world. Language, objects, and formal structures are transformed into emotional containers, while gestures of retreat and drift suggest provisional refuges within cultural displacement. Seen in this light, “Hippocampal Overflow” operates both as a collective neural response and as an act of memory restoration. When primary systems of remembrance falter, art may emerge as an alternative site of storage and connection—enabling continued documentation, dialogue, and the preservation of survival possibilities.
This time, RIVER ART GALLERY has chosen to transform the invitation into an open call, driven by an undeniable reality—we are all already immersed in a narrative landscape where familiarity crumbles. As “Hippocampal Overflow” is constantly declared the defining symptom of our era, how might we seek self-redemption? Step into the show and join the artists in reassembling meaning from the fragmented remnants, creating a myth that belongs to ourselves and the present moment.
About the organizer
RIVER ART GALLERY was founded in 1998 in Taichung, Taiwan. The gallery’s initial years were known for, the director, Ray Hung’s interest in sculptural art; and in the process, discovering renowned Taiwanese artists, such as Li Chen and Hung Yi. After over two decades of focusing on working with Taiwanese artists domestically, the gallery gradually opened up its program to an international roster in 2021, with the presence of the new director, Ella Hung, the youngest daughter of gallery founder, Ray Hung. Ella Hung’s present-day program resides in a brand new, four-level, 1600 sqft gallery space in the heart of Taichung City.
The gallery made its first steps to broadening its roster with the addition of artists who are somewhat close to home, such as Taiwanese-Canadian artist; Yi-Shuan Lee, and Taiwanese-American artist; Timothy Bair. The decision for working with these 90s born artists who have spent time living outside of their motherland, is a direct way for the gallery to reintroduce a much more expansive, and yet contemporary, idea of what Formosan culture stands for on an international stage.
Now, a few years into Ella Hung’s program at River Art Gallery, along with the much larger premises to accommodate the demands of the wide range of exhibition practices in its steadily growing roster of internationally recognized artists; River Art Gallery strives to take on an even greater presence on the global stage, with a commitment to invigorate academic as well as educational purposes. The gallery’s program is based on a determination to build and grow alongside the top innovative figures of today, in radically rethinking the exhibition as a form and taking it as a critical medium.