YIRI ARTS Taipei is currently presenting Magical Everyday, a group exhibition on view from September 10 to October 31, 2026. The exhibition includes works from Taiwanese artist Sun Pei-Mao’s CCTV series.
Born in Taipei in 1991, Sun received his MFA in Painting from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2017 and participated in an exchange program at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2016. Born with a color vision deficiency that affects how he distinguishes certain intermediate hues, Sun has developed a sustained exploration of color and a cinematic visual language grounded in figurative painting. His Garden Touring series received an Honorable Mention at the 2017 Taipei Art Awards.
In the CCTV series, Sun turns his attention to ordinary urban settings, including residential lanes, stairwells, and street corners. Elevated and oblique viewpoints, architectural divisions, and small figures dispersed throughout the compositions recall images captured by surveillance cameras. The figures walk, pause, or move through space in seemingly ordinary ways, yet their actions become difficult to interpret once removed from any clear context. Each painting resembles a single frame extracted from a continuous recording, appearing to offer evidence while withholding what happened before or after.
The title CCTV also makes the act of looking part of the work. Viewers seem to occupy a position behind the camera, observing other people’s lives from a distance while constructing possible narratives from limited clues. Tones of teal, pink, violet, and dark red transform familiar urban spaces, introducing subjective emotion into an apparently objective mode of observation. The scenes remain suspended between documentation and fiction, public and private life, stillness and suspense.
In dialogue with Magical Everyday, the magical emerges not from supernatural events, but from the subtle displacement produced when everyday life is watched, cropped, and repainted. Familiar streets and homes remain recognizable, yet become increasingly strange through distance, suspended time, and incomplete narratives. In this way, CCTV raises a distinctly contemporary question: when images appear to be everywhere, is seeing truly the same as understanding?