About the event
■ Duration ｜2025 / 9 / 13 - 11 / 8
■ Opening ｜ 9 / 13 (Sat) 4 PM
■ Venue ｜ RIVER ART GALLERY
RIVER ART GALLERY will present the group exhibition “Embers Underfoot”, featuring five artists of diverse backgrounds: Hong Kong-born, Canadian artist Peter Hong-Tsun Chan; Canadian artist Winnie Truong; London-based Taiwanese artist Yu Cheng Yen; and Chinese artists Xinyan Zheng and Xinran Liu, active in Germany and the UK.
Taking the upheavals of the contemporary world as a point of departure, the exhibition examines how humanity sustains beliefs and values amid uncertainty. Anchored in the concept of superstition, it reframes the term not as blind faith or irrationality, but as a cultural and psychological phenomenon—both a primal response to the unknown and an emblematic practice that unites communities and preserves memory. The exhibition aims to move beyond a negative framework, reconsidering superstition’s contemporary significance through cultural, psychological, and symbolic lenses.
In history, superstition has been woven into everyday actions, objects, and symbols, forming a kind of “secular belief.” Independent of organized religion, it nonetheless shapes worldviews and collective memory through distinct aesthetics and practices. Fire, regarded as sacred across civilizations, signifies illumination, invocation, and revelation; “embers”—the remnants of fire—embody continuity, survival, and renewal. They can nurture or destroy, but ultimately settle as cultural sediment, nourishing the ground on which society and individuals stand.
The show begins with Yu Cheng Yen’s work, where imagery of childhood plants and the transformative processes of alchemy symbolize incubation, change, and reconstruction, initiating a spiritual alchemy of time and memory, as well as seeking renewal amid ruins. It then leads into the evocative world of Peter Hong-Tsun Chan, whose practice draws upon the cinematic sensibilities of 1990s Hong Kong. Through the interplay of chance, aesthetics, and cultural symbols, his works raise philosophical questions about fate and belief within social and visual culture.
When the outcomes of superstition manifest, can we in turn trace back the psychological and cultural mechanisms at play? Xinran Liu’s work, in dialogue with Chan’s representational forms, she captures fleeting thoughts and memories through abstraction. In this intuitive translation, she reveals the patterns and impulses within humanity’s collective unconscious. Similarly, Winnie Truong’s intricate cut- paper works blur the boundary between human and environment, challenging viewers’ reliance on perceptual familiarity and raising the question: Is perception itself already culturally shaped?
Xinyan Zheng, long engaged with issues of women and children, reveals when superstition comes to extremes through reimagined portraits of 1970s cabaret dancers. Exaggerated and whimsical, the portraits expose the imprint of an era while probing hidden value systems in contemporary society. The show concludes with Yu Cheng Yen’s “Philosopher’s Stone” series, suggesting that everything will leave behind the intangible “spiritual embers”—like fossils of the soul—through the crucible of history and belief.
Through “Embers Underfoot”, RIVER ART GALLERY creates a cross-cultural dialogue, inviting audiences to reconsider superstition as cultural sediment layered through time. It is at once a gentle flame and a searing burn; both vessel of belief and mirror of reality. Within these embers, the exhibition invites viewers to witness the persistence of the human spirit and the regeneration of cultural foundations.
About the organiser
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.