OWEN FU: OWN ALONE

P·P·O·W is pleased to present Own Alone, Owen Fu’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

January 31 - March 8, 2025

In his paintings, which often depict surreal domestic scenes cast in a nocturnal glow, ghostly figures and inanimate objects merge as the distinction between reality and dreams disintegrates. Featuring a new series of paintings on canvas and mixed media, the exhibition reveals the mysterious emotional landscape residing underneath the surface of ordinary life. In hazy brushstrokes of grey, green, brown, and white, Fu’s shadowy characters float in a brew of humor, sincerity, loneliness, joy, emptiness, and hope.

The core concept of Own Alone draws from Pai Hsien-yung’s 1983 novel Crystal Boys. The first Chinese novel to center on themes of homosexuality, the story follows an adolescent boy’s journey to find a new home within the underground gay community of Taiwan after being cast out by his own family.

Interweaving motifs from Hsien-yung’s novel with Fu’s own experiences of alienation and immigration from China to the United States, the exhibition combines Eastern and Western painting traditions and art historical tropes to create uncanny compositions in which amorphous figures with no place to call their own flow through crowds, cruising spots under the shadows of park trees, and neon lit misty saunas, to seek connection, solace, and sanctuary.

In reference to this new body of work Fu writes, “Caught between these two worlds, I find myself without a place to truly belong. Where do I fit in? Invisible walls rise between my family and me, filled with truths I wish to speak but cannot express. We are children of the night, wandering under the city’s glow, our fragile light borrowed from moonbeams and streetlamps, never our own.”