On a Clear Day You can See Forever: A Yi-Shuan Lee Exhibition
■ 地點 Venue ｜ 大河美術 RIVER ART GALLERY
大河美術很榮幸舉辦李奕諠於本藝廊的首次個展。展覽包含藝術家近期的一系列繪畫作品，進一步探討了寓言性的感知、重新展開的反思，以及形塑當代存在狀態中的情感結構。
出生於 1995 年的加拿大籍臺裔藝術家李奕諠，長期游移於亞洲與北美之間。他的創作實踐發展出一種難以被單一風格歸類的感知結構——它既不落入懷舊式自傳的範疇，也拒絕純粹對當代情境直接反映。在一個日益受到重複、身份框架重疊與加速可見性所形塑的文化時刻中，藝術家的繪畫維持著一種罕見的形式與情感上的真誠。既與超現實主義保持距離，也不同於近年被廣泛提及的「夢核（dreamcore）」式情感語言。
李奕諠的繪畫不僅是一種風格立場，更接近於一種懸置於本能、形式與預感之間的具象感知。這些圖像並非源自夢境，而是來自一種朝向現實本身的動物性直覺，一種對氛圍與時代當下，無意識的敏銳反射。《On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever》借用了近乎過度浪漫主義的語言；然而，在他的創作框架之中，這句話轉化為某種更為內化的事物：一種暫時性的心理信念，彷彿只要天空仍然晴朗，人們便得以繼續相信某種共同秩序、溫柔或連貫性的可能。展覽主視覺——藝術家父母的婚禮照——既是文件，也是幽影，保存著一種曾經確實存在過的希望與集體樂觀。那種「至少今日天空依然晴朗」的靜默感，也成為本展潛藏的情緒結構。
李奕諠的繪畫棲居於一種由壓縮的形體、厚重的輪廓與帶有黑色幽默的變形所構成的視覺語言中。然而，在這種熟悉感下，潛伏著一種難以言說的不安。基於此，我們或許能從他的作品聯想到如 Dr. Seuss 等人物所建立的系譜；在其中，科普通俗的圖像語彙不只是美學選擇，而是作為一種結構，使荒謬、錯誤與黑色幽默得以存於集體焦慮的灰色地帶，傳達了幽默從不是逃避，更像是一種生存機制。展出作品揭示了觀看的意義，這並不是一種智性的辨識行為，而是一種身體性的本能。他關注的核心始終不是物件或敘事本身，而是形式（form）如何在圖像中成為存在條件：輪廓如何形成心理重量、空間如何產生感知上的壓力、形體如何轉化為一種存在狀態。就此而言，他的作品與 Alex Colville 所建立的具象邏輯產生某種隱性的連結——當陰影退去，物件逐漸脫離其再現功能，轉而讓位於被建構出的精神空間——正是這種位移，使藝術得以持續跨越世代而被觸及與閱讀。
展中反覆出現的混凝土空心磚與灰色地毯等元素，超越了裝飾性的功能，成為當代人在平凡日常中存在狀態的隱喻。在一個日益由效用、優化與榨取所支配的世界裡，李奕諠試圖保存那些尚未被完全定義或工具化的感知形式。這些可辨識的圖像不再僅僅作為描繪，更接近一則未完成的寓言（allegory）——透過身體與日常相遇而累積出的預示感，或可被描述為一道「未來殘影（future afterimage）」，停留在歷史轉折的臨界之處。
最終，藝術家與《On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever》所關注的，或許從來不是我們看見了什麼，而是形塑我們如何觀看的那份好奇。在幽默與恐懼、日常與預兆、形式與存在間，李奕諠保存了那些短暫卻真實，人類真正在場，抵抗標籤與歸納的時刻。正是在那樣短暫的晴日與曠野之中，我們得以意識到：永恆並非誕生於確信，而是即使身處不穩，仍願意繼續凝視且向世界呼喚的堅強意志。
River Art Gallery is excited to present Yi-Shuan Lee’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together a recent body of paintings, the exhibition explores allegorical perception, renewed reflection, and the affective architectures that shape contemporary existence.
Born in 1995, Taiwanese-Canadian artist Yi-Shuan Lee has moved between Asia and North America for much of his life. His practice has developed through a perceptual structure resistant to singular stylistic classification. His work exists outside the terrain of nostalgic autobiography, yet equally resists functioning as either direct observation or reflection of the contemporary condition. In a cultural moment increasingly shaped by repetition, identity consensus, and accelerated visibility, Lee’s paintings maintain a rare sense of formal and emotional sincerity. His work maintains a distance from Surrealism while remaining distinct from the dreamlike affective language commonly associated with “dreamcore.” More than a stylistic position, Lee’s paintings approach a mode of representation suspended between instinct, form, and premonition. These images do not emerge from dreams, but from an animalistic intuition towards reality itself, an embodied sensitivity to atmosphere and the unconscious tensions of the present moment.
“On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever” borrows the language of near-excessive romanticism, yet within Lee’s framework the phrase becomes something markedly more interior: a temporary psychological conviction, as though the persistence of clear skies might still allow one to believe in the possibility of communal order, tenderness, or coherence. The exhibition’s central image, a wedding portrait of the artist’s parents, serves as both document and apparition, preserving a form of hope and collective optimism that once undeniably existed. The quiet sensation that “at least today, the sky remains clear” becomes the exhibition’s underlying emotional architecture.
Lee’s paintings inhabit a visual language of compressed forms, thick contours, and darkly humorous distortions. Beneath this visual familiarity, however, lingers an unease that resists articulation. In this sense, his work recalls the lineage of figures such as Dr. Seuss, where graphic vernacular becomes more than an aesthetic decision, operating instead as a structure through which absurdity, error, and dark humour mediate collective anxiety. Humour, in Lee’s work, is never escapist; it operates instead as a mechanism of survival.
For Lee, looking is not an intellectual act of recognition, but a bodily instinct. The central concern of his practice has never been narrative or objecthood alone, but the conditions through which form exists within the image; how contours accumulate psychological weight, how space produces perceptual pressure, and how figures transform into states of being. In this regard, his work enters into a subtle dialogue with the figurative logic established by Canadian war artist Alex Colville. As shadows recede, objects gradually detach from their representational function, giving way to constructed psychic spaces. It is perhaps this displacement that allows the work to remain continuously legible across generations.
Throughout the exhibition, recurring elements such as concrete cinderblocks and grey carpeting move beyond decoration to become metaphors for contemporary existence within the mundane. In a world increasingly governed by utility, optimisation, and extraction, Lee seeks to preserve forms of perception that have not yet been fully defined or instrumentalised. The recognisable imagery within his paintings no longer functions simply as depiction, but as an unfinished allegory: a premonitory faculty accumulated through the body’s encounter with the everyday, or what might be described as a “future afterimage” lingering at the threshold of historical transition.
Ultimately, both the artist and the exhibition are less concerned with what we see than with the curiosity that shapes how we see. Between humour and dread, the ordinary and the prophetic, form and existence, Lee preserves fleeting moments of genuine human presence that resist categorisation. It is precisely within such temporary clearings that one becomes aware that eternity is not born from certainty, but from the willingness to continue looking and to continue calling out to the world, even from within instability.
