"The Coarseness of Man" - Shanlai Ohai Solo Exhibition

This exhibition brings important recent works by Shanlai Ohai (善萊歐海), a young Kavalan artist from Hualien, using a rough and intuitive oil painting vocabulary to explore the true faces of the body, emotion, and humanity.

Shanlai Ohai grew up in an environment interwoven with museums, archaeological fieldwork, and tribal culture, and has long focused on the relationship between people and culture, memory, and life. An artistic journey to Paris, France, led him to rethink the essence of creation, beginning to let go of meticulous design and planning, facing the canvas in a freer, more intuitive way, allowing paint, lines, and emotions to flow naturally.

The "coarseness" in the exhibition title "The Coarseness of Man" is not just a form of brushstroke expression, but also an attitude towards life. The artist attempts to overturn people's stereotypes of "roughness," believing that roughness is not a flaw but the most sincere state of existence. Those imperfect lines, broken traces, and unadorned body images are the truest evidence of life.

Most of the works in this exhibition take the human body as the main subject of expression, presenting emotional states where strength and fragility, intimacy and loneliness coexist through simplified limb contours and unrestrained color layering. As viewers move between the works, they not only see the artist's depiction of the body but can also rethink their own relationship with the world.