Tic Tac Toe: Elsewhere

Pipe Gallery is pleased to present the 2025 edition of Tic Tac Toe: Elsewhere, on view from December 12 to January 3. Tic Tac Toe is a long-term program dedicated to introducing emerging artists, through which the gallery has continuously highlighted new trajectories in contemporary visual practice. The title refers to the abstract strategy game that, despite its simplicity, is deterministically bound to end in a draw when both players make optimal moves. Its accessibility—requiring no elaborate strategy—offers a conceptual foundation for the exhibition. Expanding upon this logic, Tic Tac Toe explores a moment in which the usual structures of competition are set aside, allowing the distinct sensibilities and perspectives of emerging artists to unfold alongside one another. Like the shared space of a perpetual draw, the exhibition brings together works that resonate on equal terms, each revealing its own singular voice while coexisting within a field of mutual presence.

This edition of 2025 Tic Tac Toe: Elsewhere presents the work of Sean Crowley, Sonahn Lee, and Yuyun Hwang, developing its subtitle Elsewhere as a point of departure. The exhibition considers how familiar spaces are transformed through emotion, memory, and perception, and how such shifts open the possibility of new worlds emerging in their interstices. It also invites us to reconsider the ways we have habitually understood place—how objects occupy their positions, how distances accrue within a landscape, and how relations are arranged—and to attend closely to the moments in which these boundaries loosen and become newly permeable.

Sean Crowley (b. 1990) develops a painterly environment shaped by the themes of imagination, play, and architecture, eliciting a sensibility that is at once familiar and subtly transcendent. He notes that emotional experience can define a sense of place more powerfully than geographic coordinates. With a playful yet contemplative disposition, Crowley investigates how objects and landscapes emerge in perception—how they approach the viewer, take form, and enter into relation with one another. Rooted in architecture and traditional drawing, his practice establishes a structural foundation for his broader experiments. His paintings become both a site for reflecting on the surrounding world and a space in which new imaginative realms are constructed. His notion of Elsewhere is less a representation of an external, recognizable location than a sensorial field generated through accumulations of color, rhythm, and bodily gesture. Within this field, viewers encounter not a fixed terrain but the possibility of another place—one that flickers into appearance and recedes again within the subtle displacements of feeling and perception.

Sonahn Lee (b. 1996) foregrounds the instability inherent in the act of seeing, prompting reflection on how perception is never fixed but continually subject to subtle shifts and reorientations. Reflected images, softened contours, and the repeated gestures of erasing and covering introduce a thin interval between scene and gaze, allowing familiar landscapes to be received anew as if estranged. Rather than narrating events, her paintings retain the currents of feeling that circulate between things, as well as traces of temperature that resist articulation in language. Viewers gradually approach an emotional afterimage that feels distant yet never unfamiliar. The Elsewhere Lee opens is not a faraway place but a site that emerges in the slender gap between looking and understanding, between relation and distance. Within this space, viewers encounter not a sharply defined figure but the residue of sensation—an interval in which their own memories and emotions permeate, revealing another kind of Elsewhere.

Yuyun Hwang (b. 1999) begins from a desire to trace the continuance of objects. Rather than possessing things fully or fixing them into stable representations, he approaches them as provisional forms that reemerge fluidly within the currents of time and memory. In the process of visually recalling the contours of antiques and repeatedly transforming them onto the canvas, objects such as teacups, candlesticks, and various ornamental items are reconstructed through blurred edges and layered accumulations, unanchored to any specific time or place. For Hwang, the essence of an object is not a fixed entity grasped at once but a form that continually opens onto other possibilities as time unfolds. This mode of thinking shifts the pictorial surface into a sensorial site that is momentarily generated—an Elsewhere. Within this space, objects are presented not as possessions to be held but as non-locational beings that dwell temporarily within relations, revealing a fluidity that endures the changing conditions of time and perception and remains perpetually subject to reconfiguration.