Hippocampal Overflow

RIVER ART GALLERY will present the group exhibition “Hippocampal Overflow,” featuring artists from different cultural and generational backgrounds, including Japanese-Cantonese-American artist Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho, British artist Penny Davenport, Taiwanese artist RayHan, Japanese-Korean-American artist Shingo Yamazaki, and Taiwanese-Canadian artist Yi-Shuan Lee. Together, they construct a contemporary allegory about memory failure, perceptual overload, and self-placement, jointly proposing a diagnosis of this era.

“Hippocampal Overflow” stems from long-term observation of contemporary artists' creative states. Looking back at the past year, from the global tremors of tariff trade wars, wars, and security crises, the changes in East Asian geopolitics, to the AI economic fever closer to our daily lives, social media regulations and bans, and the regrettable attacks at the end of the year that deeply shook Taiwanese society—all point to a common and urgent reality: we are living in a world of high-speed information, infinite digital signal superposition, and frequent emotional and cognitive imbalances. When existing collective narratives gradually fail, absurd film-like plots or logically broken, unspeakable dreams become part of daily experience. People are forced to retreat to a more private level, trying to re-weave meaning from scattered perceptions, broken memories, and residual symbols, finding a place for themselves to be temporarily placed.

The term “Hippocampal” comes from the hippocampus, a key area in the human brain responsible for linking memory, emotion, and spatial perception. It can instantly integrate events and feelings, and repeatedly replay daily experiences during rest and sleep, allowing memories to settle and transform. Its etymology combines the Greek images of “horse” (hippos) and “sea monster” (kampos): half-human, serpentine, with a tail like a scorpion—an existence between reality and illusion, both quiet and harboring danger, like a dream itself. Today, this system of memory and emotion is under unprecedented pressure. The high intervention of digital technology causes human and AI memories to intertwine; the long-term trauma of war, migration, and pandemics causes collective emotions to hover between preservation and loss; identity boundaries continue to be dismantled and reorganized, and climate disasters force the memory system shared by humans and all things to vibrate and collapse together. When the hippocampus is overloaded, short-term memories cannot be converted into long-term storage, the subconscious begins to lose order, and the boundary between reality and imagination gradually blurs—fantasy is no longer just a place for escape, but overflows into reality, becoming a mirror of our daily life.

In “Hippocampal Overflow,” the exhibiting artists respond to the psychological state brought about by this excess reality in their own independent yet echoing ways: looking back at childhood and myths to repair broken collective imagination; reflecting human fragility and contradictions through the gaze of animals and nature; or transforming language, objects, and forms into emotional containers to find temporary shelter in a state of cultural drift. This exhibition is both a collective neural response and an act of memory repair. When the first level of the memory system is declared invalid, art perhaps becomes another way of continuous recording and dialogue, preserving the possibility of survival.

RIVER ART GALLERY has chosen to open invitations this time simply because of a reality that has already taken shape—you and I are already in a narrative context where the familiar has collapsed. When “Hippocampal Overload” is repeatedly declared as our era's disease, how can we save ourselves? Walk into the scene and, together with the artists, reassemble meaning from the remaining fragments to create a myth belonging to yourself and the present.

#GroupExhibition #OilPainting #MixedMedia