“Archipelagoes happen, congeal, take place. They are not immanent or natural categories existing independently of interpretation. Yet they also become an episteme, an imaginary, a way of thinking, a poetic, a hermeneutic, a method of inquiry, a system of relations. They are painful and generative, implicated in native cosmologies or cosmo-visions, or assembled as part of imperial colonial undertakings. They can refer to multidimensional, focal, spatial forms of thinking that emerge from concrete relationships with inhabited spaces. But … they also require a loving reassembling that signifies beyond the dehumanizing centripetal forces of globalization.”
 

—Michele Stephens and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (2023)

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LOY Contemporary Art Gallery presents No Island is an Island (Mar 5–May 5, 2026), a group show of island-originating or -residing artists, each of whose approach manifests as cultural fragments in a field of disparate voices. These voices emanate from strikingly different artworks by Singapore-born, Columbus (Ohio)–based artist Ivan David Ng, China-born, Hong Kong–based painter Liu Bin, and Singapore-born, Brooklyn-based mixed-media painter Nature Shankar. Collectively, they reflect a discordant aesthetics in a fluid, co-dependent world.
 

In constellation, the featured artworks speak to the exhibition’s archipelagic framework: emphasizing relationality, cultural heritage, and contingency. Each piece is a portable fragment in a larger narrative—an island in an archipelago, where there is no fixed point. 
 

In a world of endless -isms to describe political ideologies, beliefs, and practices, including those separating “them” from “us,” No Island celebrates divergence: in perspectives, traditions, conceptions of time and space, and vantage points. The dominant narrative favors thinking about how similar we should be, no matter our race, creed, national origins, class, biology, or religion; this exhibition challenges such a narrative by emphasizing how different we are.

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Abnormal is normal. Acknowledging how we differ enriches our shared humanity and makes it available for appreciation.

 

The works probe at definitions of reality, genre, medium, matter, and perception. While each work displaces viewers from their usual points of reference through abstraction, material experimentation, and surrealism, the exhibition aims to displace the works themselves from their own internal frames of reference.

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The show asserts that no island is ever truly an “island” in the isolated, insular sense. Every work (“island”) influences how energy moves through space, how light bounces off a surface, how viewers “read” the next work, what materials can mean, and the conversations that emerge. The pieces coyly provoke alternative ways of relating to the world and one another, while helping us identify with a shared grouping (like islands in an archipelago that might share a common language).

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No Island is an Island invites viewers to question seemingly fixed structures, categories, and binaries as fabricated footholds that have been normalized and accepted as “given,” challenging the gallery’s visitors to question the assumed values that organize their lives, and to push back on the insidious, moralizing structures of the “normal,” “sensible,” and “beautiful.”

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Even the ways we are different, you and I, are never fixed, and instead ebb with time.