Silverlens presents a tight selection of artists from southeast Asia and the diaspora working across generations, locations, and media - James Clar (b. 1979, USA, of Philippine heritage), Maria Taniguchi (b. 1981, Philippines), Mit Jai Inn (b. 1960, Thailand).

James Clar is a light and media artist. His work analyzes the effects of media and technology on our perception of culture, nationality, and identity. James will be premiering a new work called Cloud Seed, an interactive video installation created for Art Dubai 2022 that immerses viewers in a simulation of rain, fog, and rain. Cloud Seed uses technology to bring attention to man’s effect on the environment in a visual way that is poetic and cinematic. Recents exhibitions of James Clar include Share Location (Silverlens, Manila), Press Reset (Jane Lombard Gallery, New York), and Gravitational Collapse (One Liberty Plaza, New York).

Maria Taniguchi’s works encompass painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Her practices investigate space and time along with social and historical contexts. Her series of Untitled brick paintings is an ongoing series that had been initiated in 2008. Maria Taniguchi will be showing one brick painting from 2018 - 19, as well as two new paintings from her series room of phases from 2021. The new series of monochromatic checkered pattern paintings calls to the imagination at once an oversized chess board or else a calendar. This visual idiom itself unravels time in its most prolific sense: hours passed or spent, days in a year, turns in a game of chess. She is the winner of the 2015 Hugo Boss Asian Art Award. Recent exhibitions include the Gwangju Biennale and the Biennale of Sydney, Australia in 2018. Selected recent projects include Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris; 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisban; New Sensorium, ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologien, Karlsruhe; HIWAR: Conversations in Amman, Amman; and Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics, Museum of Contemporary Art (MHKA), Antwerp.

Mit Jai Inn is a widely respected senior Thai artist known for his boundary-defying painting and socially engaged practices. Mit will be showing pieces from his series titled Actants. Actants refers to both human and non-human agents as equal participants in an ongoing set of transformations – a metaphor for the artist’s collaboration with light, color, labor, and time in contextual relation to metaphysical, political and social constructions of power and belief. Mit extends his homage and playful dissent from tenants of modernism, with rich crossings into the realm and language of textiles and weaving. Recent exhibitions of Mit Jai Inn include Dreamworld (IKON Gallery, Birmingham), Art on Farm (Jim Thompson Farm, Thailand), Junta Monochromes (Silverlens, Manila), and Royal Marketplace (Rossi and Rossi, Hong Kong).

James Clar (b. 1979, USA; lives and works in New York & Manila) is a light and media artist. His work analyzes the effects of media and technology on our perception of culture, nationality, and identity. He studied film at NYU and received his Masters from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. It was here that he began developing his own light systems to create visual sculptural works that combine light and technology.

Clar’s interest is in new technological production processes and their application to artistic narrative forms. His work often deals with the perception of reality and the information systems that create it. 

Mit Jai Inn was born in 1960 in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he lives and works today. Several of his early experiences remain influential to him, including the communal and aesthetic aspects of being raised in an Indigenous Yong weaving village, a meditation and political practice drawn from six years as a Theravada Buddhist monk, and the labor and endurance of training two years as a professional Muay Thai boxer. Mit then studied art at Silpakorn University, Bangkok (1982-1986) and continued studies at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (1987-1992), during which time he worked as assistant to artist Franz West. Returning to Chiang Mai in 1992, Mit initiated social and politically focused art initiatives, including as co-founder of Chiang Mai Social Installation (1992-), as well as involvement with Midnight University and The Land Foundation – three non-institutional projects central to Thai contemporary art practice and discourse. In 2015, Mit also founded Cartel Artspace in Bangkok, a gallery offering space to artists reflecting on Thailand and Southeast Asia’s historical and current context. Mit’s recent exhibitions include: Actants, Silverlens, Manila; Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong; SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia from 1980s to Today, Mori Art Museum and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts; and SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium and Engagement, The 21st Biennale of Sydney.

Maria Taniguchi was born in Dumaguete City, the Philippines, in 1981. She won the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2015 and was a LUX Associate Artist in 2009. Recent exhibitions include 12th Gwangju Biennale: Imagined Borders, Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Centre, South Korea (2018); 21st Biennale of Sydney, SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium & Engagement, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia (2018); History of a vanishing present: A prologue, the Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2016); Afterwork, Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); Globale: New sensorium, ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (2016); The vexed contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); and the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2015). Her work is held in a number of collections including the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the Burger Collection, Hong Kong; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; QAGOMA, Brisbane; and the K11 Art Foundation, Shanghai.