About the event
■ Duration ｜2025 / 11 / 22 - 2026 / 01 / 10
■ Opening ｜ 11 / 22 (Sat) 4 PM
■ Venue ｜ RIVER ART GALLERY
RIVER ART GALLERY will host the first solo exhibition by the Vietnamese artist Mai Ta in Asia. The exhibition presents a new body of work, returning to a simplicity she had never known. “The Heart” is a collection of works reckoning with the artist’s feelings of powerlessness from being a witness to tragedy, reflecting the mutedness and incapacity amid contemporary upheavals — something she has come to accept as an intrinsic quality of the human condition. Coinciding with the upcoming 14th Taipei Biennial, “Whispers on the Horizon”, the exhibition enables Mai Ta's works to naturally enter the intersection between Asian artists and the global context.
Born in 1997 in Vietnam, Mai Ta received her BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is now based in Saigon. She work with oil on cavas and uses gouache to paint on paper and wood boards, depicting her inner desires and her quest for reconciliation with the world. Through her art, she conveys the inner wounds, secrets, and memories within her, while sublimating them into her own symbols. Mai Ta seeks truth within her emotions and expresses them with honor through her paintings. For her, art is a form that allows her to safely and freely express herself. “The Heart” is an intentionally straightforward title, pointing to the most fragile and candid part of the human self; it’s also a white flag — symbolizing a helpless response to grief and an emotional surrender — these feelings, to her, are a part of the burden humanity bears from birth.
Tragedy has always been central to the artist’s work. Her images do not attempt to provide answers, but rather crystallize a sense of incapability into visual language, allowing the canvas to become the most honest record. They are the annotations of the most private dreams, as well as the echoes of shared predicaments. What is to be done when one’s only skill ends at the final brushstroke? What is to be done when betrayal leaves its sticky residue, sap-like in quality, endless in nature? Who would she be without this world she’d created for herself, in which her dreams are fortunetellers, and her heart a white flag? She is not exempt from suffering, resolving herself to the futility of symbols — the black horse, birds, the empty rooms. They carry the individual traumas and memories, but also mirror the impermanence of history and the mutual perceptual fractures of the world.
“The Heart” is a personal statement, a sincere gaze towards the barrenness of the collective symbols. The pure and fierce tension weaves individual emotions with communal culture, local experiences with global contexts, creating intricate narratives. Water laps at shore, whirlpools form in secret. Trees twist in agony while a bird sits still, as if to watch. RIVER ART GALLERY invites the audience to enter the spiritual realm, confronting the elephant in the room, sharing the weight of futility and silence with the artist. Within this shared landscape of pain and longing, we come to realize how inescapably bound we are to these conditions.
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.