PTT Space榮幸宣布推出全新策展計畫——「表面張力：四條關於慾望的論綱」（Surface Tension; or, Four Theses on the Nature of Desire）。本計畫展出來自耶魯大學藝術學院（Yale School of Art）2025年繪畫與版畫研究所，共四位亞洲藝術家及其精彩作品，同時也是PTT SPACE繼2023年的展覽「高度不足」（Low Clearance）之後，第二次與耶魯大學藝術碩士畢業生進行的合作項目，以此持續實現著致力於推廣亞洲及海外新興藝術實踐的承諾。

「表面張力」策展計畫將在2025年秋季以兩階段、雙主題的展覽檔期進行呈現，並聚焦於以下藝術家：庾永（Jam Yoo），2016年康乃爾大學美術學士、2025年耶魯大學美術碩士；哈福薩・諾曼（Hafsa Nouman），2025年耶魯大學美術碩士；阮公心（Z.T. Nguyễn），2019年羅德島設計學院美術學士、2025年耶魯大學美術碩士；崔元禎（Claire Chey），2019年加州大學洛杉磯分校美術學士、2025年耶魯大學美術碩士。他們分別從自身獨特的脈絡和文化參照點出發，檢視並探討慾望、肉體和認同的想像和建構，進而形成各自的跨學科實踐。

展覽「表面張力」從「表面」的概念延伸出的線索——表面是具獨特空間性的視覺平面，也是具表徵之媒體所依附的物質界面——試圖展現繪畫形式慣例所強制推行的平面透視如何被顛覆，以及物理和概念彼此對立所產生的潛在張力，如何成為進一步理解慾望在維護當代文化和社會中視覺首要地位的關鍵性功能。

在第一階段的展覽「表面」（9月17日至10月25日）中，庾永（Jam Yoo）打破了繪畫當中的直線透視邏輯，透過大衛與歌利亞的形象，探究酷兒群體難以駕馭的身體政治。其中大衛與歌利亞的圖像源自於聖經，而二者的關係一直是作為描述權力關係和權力鬥爭的隱喻，並帶有鮮明的同性戀色彩；另一方面，哈福薩・諾曼（Hafsa Nouman）將繪製的畫布定位為一種邊界之物，透過巧妙的空間辯證，質疑並破壞以視覺性和時間性作為定位框架的認知機制。她運用了腐蝕、光學反射等方式，捕捉並保留了對於物理現實界的想像。

第二階段的展覽「張力」（11月1日至12月6日），阮公心（Z.T. Nguyễn）藉由運用家飾紡織品及配件，重塑身份的認同與渴望，並巧妙構想出一種關於柔軟、可愛的新穎語彙，由此形成一種矛盾的反抗，用以面對晚期資本主義處境下，文化歸屬感被收編後的商品化本質。崔元禎（Claire Chey）則透過繪畫和素描，對作為一名女性的狀態，進行形式與質地相關的抽象闡述，進而探究面對塑造陰性氣質時相互交織的本能與恐懼。

「表面張力：四條關於慾望的論綱」是由策展人邱上源（Alfonse Chiu，2025年耶魯大學MED）所進行為期兩年的策展計畫，同時也是策展人在視覺藝術和建築教育的框架下，在文化的勞動和創造、美術展覽與商業生態之間，進行的一場饒富實踐趣味的對話。


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Taipei, Taiwan - PTT Space is delighted to announce 'Surface Tension; or, Four Theses on the Nature of Desire', a curatorial project featuring the works of Asian artists from the Yale School of Art Painting and Printmaking Graduate Class of 2025. This presentation marks PTT Space's second collaboration with recent Yale MFA graduates, following the group exhibition 'Low Clearance' in 2023, and further cements the gallery's commitment to platforming emerging practices from Asia and diasporas.

Staged over two thematic phases across fall 2025, 'Surface Tension' spotlights four artists—Jam Yoo (Cornell BFA'16, Yale MFA'25), Hafsa Nouman (Yale MFA'25), Z.T. Nguyễn (RISD BFA'19, Yale MFA'25), and Claire Chey (UCLA BA'19, Yale MFA'25)—whose interdisciplinary practices each examines and troubles the imaginaries and construction of desire, corporeality, and identity from across their distinct contexts and cultural reference points. Extending a thread of inquiry from a conception of surface as a visual plane with distinct spatiality and as a material interface for representational media to adhere to, 'Surface Tension' seeks to draw into view both the ways through which the planar perspective, as enforced by the formal conventions of painting, can be subverted, as well as how latent tensions generated by physical and conceptual oppositions can serve as a key for understanding the infrastructural function of desire in maintaining the primacy of visuality in contemporary culture and society.

In 'Surface' (17 Sep - 25 Oct), Jam Yoo dislocates the rectilinear logic of painting as a genre to probe at the unruly body politics of queerness through the figures of David and Goliath, a biblical relationship that has persisted as a descriptive metaphor for narrativising power relations and power struggles, with distinct homo-erotic undertones; meanwhile, Hafsa Nouman interrogates and destabilises the epistemic regimes of visuality and temporality as frameworks of orientation through sly spatial arguments that position the painted canvas as boundary objects that capture and maintain the imagined instances of physical reality such as processes of corrosion and optical reflections.

In 'Tension' (1 Nov - 6 Dec), Z.T. Nguyễn fabricates identification and longing through the appropriation of domestic textile surfaces and accessories that imagines a sly, new material vocabulary of softness and cuteness as both resistance and ambivalence towards the commodified nature of how cultural belonging is codified under conditions of late capital; meanwhile, Claire Chey studies viscerality and horror as entwined modes of refiguring femininity as both an ontological and psycho-somatic subjectivity through paintings and drawings that clarifies and abstracts the forms and textures commonly associated with the state of being female.

Curated by Alfonse Chiu (Yale MED'25), 'Surface Tension; or, Four Theses on the Nature of Desire' is the culmination of a two-year-long conversation on embedded curatorial and convivial practices within the framework of studio art and architecture education that stands at an uneasy distance across from both museal and commercial ecologies of cultural labour and creation.