As the Mountain Slides into the Sea: Timothy Bair Solo Exhibition

This summer, RIVER ART GALLERY is proud to present “As the Mountain Slides into the Sea”, the first solo exhibition in Asia by Taiwanese American artist Timothy Bair. The exhibition continues Bair’s ongoing meditation on memory, distance, and the quiet ache of disconnection from the landscapes that once shaped him.

Born in 1996 in Taiwan, Bair is currently based in New York and pursuing his MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. He was a resident at the Silver Arts Residency in 2023. His work, at once personal and political, draws from lived experience as a disabled person to confront ableism within the art world and beyond. Working across painting and sculpture, Bair explores the intersection of individual memory and collective history, translating the specificity of the crip experience into a broader visual language that speaks across ability. As a disability consultant, he has helped transform more than 25 art spaces in Taiwan and New York into accessible environments.

As a disabled artist, Bair can no longer physically access the mountains, rivers, and trails of his childhood in Taiwan. Through drawing, he revisits these now-distant places, mapping not geography but feeling. His intricate visual language reveals both the intimacy of longing and the politics of access. At its core, the show foregrounds Bair’s sustained engagement with physical accessibility and spatial justice in contemporary art.

“As the Mountain Slides into the Sea” functions both as poetic imagery and metaphor. A landslide, often seen as collapse or erasure, becomes a moment of transformation where ruin gives way to connection, and distance gestures toward return. Rather than depicting landscapes literally, Bair’s work captures their emotional and spiritual resonance. What’s lost becomes material again, remapped through tenderness, absence, and reverie.

Partway up the gallery’s main stairwell, a carved faux-stone sculpture reads: “To experience this exhibition as the artist intended, please request the lift.” This subtle interruption invites visitors to reflect on the physical assumptions embedded in gallery design. Whose bodies are planned for? Who is left out of the imagined viewer? The piece embodies the show’s central tension, between presence and invisibility, between access and exclusion. At the far end of the exhibition, the work Gone remains intentionally unfinished. With sparse textures and restrained color, it feels like the final breath of a dying fire. What remains hovers between memory and disappearance. Within this in-between space, a shimmer persists, an echo held just below the surface. For Bair, art becomes a vessel, a way to hold flickering memories and to honor what’s no longer reachable but never fully lost.

RIVER ART GALLERY is honored to present the poetic clarity of Timothy Bair’s work. This exhibition opens a vital conversation about embodiment, spatial politics, and emotional memory. As viewers move through the show, catching sight of a stone path, the silhouette of a tree, or a bird poised at the edge, what may seem ordinary becomes quietly monumental. These moments, like memory itself, unfold slowly and refuse to fade.