East Village, New York
Devon Pin-Yu Chen
Happy Islands
Nguyen WahedGMTC — Golden Monkey Trading Company 金猿商社 is pleased to present Happy Islands, the debut solo exhibition by Taiwanese artist Devon Pin-Yu Chen. Inaugurating Nguyen Wahed’s mission to support emerging artists with an experimental ethos, this exhibition utilizes the gallery’s basement space in collaboration with gmtc, a performance laboratory in Chinatown, New York. Highlighting the performative gestures within Chen’s art practice, Happy Islands explores how ceramics–her primary medium–serve as an anchor, undergirding her and her fellow "islanders" in a stillness amid the darkened ocean of the basement. For Chen, an islander from Taiwan, ceramic-making is a way of forming a sense of home through material and weight. She describes the characters in her work as "placeholders"– structures that house memory and presence. Much like a turtle carrying its shelter, Chen navigates migratory experience by "freezing" all the ephemerals in clay, allowing the dimmed light of the basement to register as an atmospheric extension of the work’s quiet resilience and the lighting as a gesture of hope. Amidst political upheaval, Chen notes that Taiwanese people are often calm, like the eye of a typhoon. Her glazed ceramics embody this stillness, conjuring a deep, dark ocean that holds its people firm and resilient. By carving distilled emotions into the earth and vitrifying them, she transforms fleeting and borrowed feelings such as ‘little happiness,’ the term Taiwanese people often cherish, into a permanent dwelling. As a child, Chen collected toy cars as vehicles for an unknown 'there.' Over time, her fascination with speed and escape evolved into the grounded act of staying—'stepping on earth.' Deeply influenced by her yoga training, she traded the external rush of vehicles for internal rhythms: the bend of the past, the stillness of the present, and the openness of the future. In this basement, her funky, cartoony sculptures and paintings manifest these temporal rhythms, captured in form. The works gather like islands—distinct yet coexisting—and islanders, anxious yet happy, anchoring the space with the stability of Tadasana (Mountain Pose). When viewers navigate these forms, their movement echoes a walking meditation: slow, attentive, and unforced. Here, performance is sensed, arising through standing, moving, and being, while the breath flows out slow and smooth. —Sunmi Yong (gmtc) & Devon Pin-Yu Chen Written by Sunmi Yong (GMTC) & Devon Pin-Yu Chen Devon Pin-Yu Chen (b. 1994) is a visual artist based in New York City from Taipei Taiwan. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and a BFA in Fashion Design from Shih Chien University. Devon is the recipient of Andrew Fisher Fellowship. Notable recent exhibitions include Fault Lines at The Blanc, New York, NY (2025); Play at LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, New York, NY (2025) and Currents at SK Gallery New York, NY (2024).