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.