The Ungeneratable — Rethinking the Necessity of Painting in an Age of Image Excess

Curator: Lin Hsuan-Han

In an age when images can be generated rapidly, the quantity and forms of images are expanding at an unprecedented scale. Looking has become more immediate, and also easier. Yet precisely under such conditions, certain experiences have become increasingly rare.

What Hann Art has long been concerned with is not how images are produced, but whether images can still make us stop. Some paintings are not easy to explain. But you remember them.

Cen Long’s work forms the core point of departure for this exhibition. His paintings do not attempt to attract attention, nor do they ask to be immediately understood. The figures appear concrete, yet they do not point to any clearly identifiable individual. More precisely, these images are closer to remnants of memory. Not a particular face, but a feeling once encountered, yet difficult to name.

Such an experience has become rare today. When images can be endlessly generated and quickly identified, this kind of viewing — one that contains ambiguity and pause — comes closer to reality. For this reason, his paintings do not rely on narrative, but return instead to a simpler question: how does one person see another?

Yasuko Hayashi’s work begins with nature, but does not belong to landscape.

In her paintings, light, water, plants, and figures remain in a state of extremely subtle transformation. There is no explicit event, nor any intense emotion. Yet looking slowly begins to take place. It is a feeling that requires time. You are not immediately drawn in, but gradually enter.

Here, nature is no longer an object to be observed, but a way for one to return to one’s own perception. This experience is quiet, and difficult to replace.

The work of Beatriz Martín Vidal, by contrast, emerges more directly from within. The world she paints looks like a dream, but it is not weightless. Children, plants, birds, and the recurring golden radiance in her paintings form a structure that approaches ritual.

These elements are not symbols to be decoded, but are closer to traces: traces left by emotion, traces left by memory, and traces of intuitions that are difficult to articulate. In her works, certain things are not “expressed,” but “preserved.” This is one of the reasons why painting is so rarely replaced.

The work of Matteo Casali Caramello brings forth another condition.

In contemporary life, human experience is often fractured. Information flows continuously, relationships shift constantly, and many things pass before they can be understood. His painting does not attempt to organize these fragments, nor does it rush to make the image whole. On the contrary, he chooses to preserve this instability. The relationship between figure and space remains in constant flux. At times, it even makes one uncertain how to look. Yet this uncertainty is itself an honest condition.

It allows the question to remain within the image, rather than being resolved too quickly. In this context, the question becomes more direct.

After images can be generated without limit, which experiences still require human beings to complete them?

The works of these four artists offer different directions.

Some come from memory, some from nature, some from the inner world, and some from observing the conditions of the contemporary moment. They do not attempt to resist technology, nor do they return to the past. They simply point out, with clarity, that certain things cannot be accelerated.

For Hann Art, painting has never merely been a question of form. It is a form of confirmation: a confirmation of whether the human being still exists within the act of looking. When images can be manufactured, looking becomes all the more important. And among all images, there remain some that belong to the human.