Breathing Surfaces

Silber Gallery, April 10 - May 30, 2025

 

In Breathing Surfaces, Thiang Uk destabilizes the familiar thresholds of painting, staging encounters with a world where nature asserts its own independent agency. Anchored in animist belief systems, Uk’s practice rejects anthropocentric narratives in favor of a landscape alive with unseen forces, restless and unclaimed.

 

Pushing against conventional framing, Uk engineers transitional spaces—interruptions where the boundary between form and formlessness slips. Surface becomes threshold; sensation, a guide. These paintings do not depict the natural world so much as they vibrate with it, evoking a realm where presence and absence are equally tangible.

 

Suspended throughout the gallery, twenty-one individual Burmese pearls trace the artist’s own dislocation—each pearl marking a year away from their birthplace of Burma. Like gravitational points scattered through air, they underscore the exhibition’s tension between memory and movement, belonging and estrangement.

Uk’s work invites not a gaze, but a kind of listening—an attunement to worlds that persist beyond the human frame. 

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Artist: Thiang Uk