Art Jakarta 2026

[ Art Fairs ] Artists: Cheng Nung-Hsuan/ YuChun Chen/ Butsapasila Wanjing

Artemin Gallery will bring three painters from Taiwan and Thailand to Booth E2 at Art Jakarta 2026: Cheng Nung-Hsuan, YuChun Chen and Butsapasila Wanjing.
Their works share a way of understanding painting — not as a record, but as a return, again and again, to a memory, a place, a history that refuses to be fixed. All three hold the image just short of completion, leaving the remaining distance for the viewer to cross alone.

All three also keep their distance from the European painting tradition even as they speak to it. Cheng lets classical oil painting collide on the canvas with the languages of other eras; Chen moves through her subjects with the bearing of a Baudelairean flâneur; Butsapasila returns to a water lily pond his family built out of their love for Monet. The reference is never the destination, only the ground they walk across.

Cheng Nung-Hsuan (b. 1983, Taipei) occupies a singular position in Taiwanese contemporary painting. He knows the composition and format of Western classical oil painting well, but does not stay there; instead, on a single canvas, he sets painterly languages from different eras and techniques side by side and lets them collide. Over finely built classical figures he lays geometric fields of colour, dry-brushed lines and fluorescent tones — dissonant notes threaded through the melody — so that a picture carries both a theatrical wholeness and a tension that never settles. He works without an underdrawing, thinking as he paints, deliberately leaving gaps that hold the image just short of completion, then filling them in another language.

YuChun Chen (b. 1980, Changhua) has long worked in oil on the themes of time, memory, dreams and the order of time. Her recent paintings turn the places she has visited and revisited into blurred, unnamed spaces — not events, only the traces of a presence — spoken in a voice that stays quiet yet never stops. She gazes from a distance that hovers between detachment and empathy: memory carries her back to a rooftop, a stretch of shoreline, a therapist’s room, and then she withholds the specifics, leaving only a gesture on the back of a chair, sunlight lingering on a wall.

Butsapasila Wanjing (b. 2000, Chiang Mai) is the youngest of the three, concerned with how collective memory shifts over time and how the past keeps leaving traces on the present. His material runs from histories that circulate online as conspiracy theories to oral beliefs, local legend and fragments that resist a national narrative. The works shown in Jakarta are from his After Monet water lily series — a return to the lily pond in front of his childhood home, built by a relative out of admiration for Monet. To an adult the lilies stand for beauty; to the child, the same pond was full of fear — the half-seen surface, the water beneath hidden by the lilies.

Art Jakarta 2026 | Booth E2

Dates: 2026 Oct 02 ⭢ Oct 04

Venue: JIExpo Kemayoran