Please, Take a Break: Two-Person Exhibition

YIRI ARTS has held a series of two-person exhibitions throughout the year, bringing together Indonesian and Taiwanese visual artists as an initiative to expand intercultural dialogue and artistic exchange. In this edition, YIRI presents Wang Guan-Jhen and Hudan Seltan as counterparts in reading and reimagining daily life. Wang Guan-Jhen explores feelings of alienation, silence, and emotional tension embedded within one's relationship to time and memory. Hudan Seltan, meanwhile, reconstructs visual fragments drawn from multiple sources in order to trace how experiences are formed and perceived.

We have grown accustomed to associating different phases of life with completion, as though each marks the end of a certain cycle. Yet within these phases, some journeys are interrupted, suspended, or endlessly repeated. In today's context, stability itself has become fragile, while time appears increasingly fragmented, making unfinished business feel almost inevitable. This exhibition explores such a landscape - one in which individuals are caught between the desire for completion and the realization that most things remain unresolved.

Bringing together paintings by both artists in their distinctive visual languages, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider what it means to pause or take a break. In Wang Guan-Jhen's practice, a break is approached through a reflective lens. Her paintings often emerge from her habit of neglecting her own moments of rest. Guan-Jhen perceives time as nonlinear and open-ended - something that waits to be resumed when the moment feels right. This openness derives from her daily practice of marking books with ordinary objects, an introspective gesture that extends into her artistic presentation. Rendered in scroll-like compositions resembling a "thread of time," her works invite viewers into a heightened perception of temporality.

Hudan Seltan, on the other hand, constructs visual compositions from fragments of everyday life through the use of found objects, which he reassembles into scenes that feel both familiar and strangely absurd. His imagery appears recognizable, yet unfolds within distorted and rearranged landscapes. This approach stems from Hudan's growing concern with the invisible pressures that permeate daily life - pressures that seep into intimate spaces, personal moments, and repetitive bodily gestures. His compositions position viewers as distant observers, disrupting conventional perceptions of reality and allowing intuition to guide the recognition of what feels aligned and what does not.

Wang Guan-Jhen (b. 1991, Taiwan) received her MFA from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2018. The alienation and solitude depicted in her works evoke a sense of solitary levitation within vacant spaces. Warm-toned sparks illuminate the otherwise dim surfaces of her canvases, while the indifferent expressions of her figures quietly reveal emotions of loss and desperation.

Her notable solo exhibitions include Breathing Ghost, YIRI ARTS, Taipei (2023); Breathing Ghost, Tainan Art Museum, Tainan (2022); Strange Wind on the Road, YIRI ARTS, Taipei (2018); A Fried Egg Song, Sonnentor Café, Taipei (2017); The Freak Guy Simply Eats the Ice Cube at the Park, YIRI ARTS Pier-2 Gallery, Kaohsiung (2016); and There's No Shelter for Those Who Are Waiting and Exhausted, YIRI ARTS Taichung Space, Taichung (2015). Selected group exhibitions include Pig Don't Fly, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei (2018); Borderline, TAKSU Gallery, Helsinki (2016); and Why We "Draw", Underground Art Museum, Taipei (2014). Her works are included in the collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

Hudan Seltan (b. 2000, Bukittinggi) is an artist whose practice revolves around memory, everyday life, and the absurdity of interpersonal relationships. His works explore the tension between isolation and intimacy in the age of digital communication, capturing a contemporary condition that feels simultaneously detached and emotional. Through painting, collage, and mixed-media works, Hudan experiments with how images are remembered, transformed, and reinterpreted. His compositions often merge public and private spaces, resembling digital "bait" imagery in which personal and collective experiences overlap. Through this approach, he examines how visual culture shapes perception while exposing the vulnerability and tension underlying everyday life.

His previous exhibitions include FIND A JOB, FIND A FRIEND, FIND A HOME, FIND A DOG, SETTLE DOWN, OUT OF TOWN FIND A DREAM, SHUT IT DOWN, Tirtodipuran Link B, Yogyakarta (2024); and TOUGH CROWD, Tirtodipuran Link A, Yogyakarta (2023). He has also participated in various group exhibitions, including Art Jakarta (2023-2025), Material Ways at Artsubs, Surabaya (2025), Wunderkammer: Space of Oddity at Fadjar Sidik Gallery, Yogyakarta (2024), and the Inaugural Group Exhibition at SUN Contemporary, Bali (2024).

Please, Take a Break reflects on the moment of pause not as a condition of complete stability. On one hand, a pause or break is always vulnerable to interruption; on the other, it can also become a transitional space in which unfinished matters slowly find their own order. Rather than framing rest as the conclusion of a process, the exhibition approaches it as a way of surviving within an ever-shifting life where no clear sense of closure can be guaranteed.