Thiang Uk: Forever and a day

The Sunday Painter announces Thiang Uk's first solo show in the UK, featuring luminous paintings built from layered color fields and structures that hold multiple realities in tension. About Thiang Uk's paintings are luminous and tumultuous, built from layered color fields, radiating bursts, and structures that hold multiple realities in tension. Forms shift and dissolve across otherworldly landscapes without a fixed horizon, evoking mythical expanses of sea, sky, and land. For Uk, shapeshifting is both subject and method - a way of picturing the adaptations demanded by new languages, cultures, and environments. The motif draws on animist stories passed down by his grandmother, alongside the Christian narratives of his childhood in Hakha, Myanmar, before he and his family fled political violence and settled in the United States when he was eleven. Across his work, formal experimentation and lived history remain inseparable, each shaping how the other is read - less interested in narrative than in the felt sensation of belonging to more than one place at once. Thiang Uk (b. 1993, Myanmar) lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Uk received his AA from Daytona State College, Daytona, FL (2014); BFA from Hunter College, New York, NY (2017); and MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2021); and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME (2023). Recent solo exhibitions include Middle Distance, art hall, Baltimore, MD (2025); Breathing Surfaces, Silber Art Gallery, Goucher College, Towson, MD (2025); and Shadow's Edge, Bureau, New York, NY (2025). Recent group exhibitions include Keeper, Indigo+Madder and MARCH NYC, London, United Kingdom (2026); centrifugal, island, New York, NY (2025); Brighter Skies, CPM, Baltimore, MD (2025); New Voices: Julia Callis, Jen P. Harris, Claudia Pena Salinas, Thiang Uk, Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, OH (2025); Scorched Petals to Pages, The Nicholson Project, Washington, DC (2024); and It Never Entered My Mind, curated by Michael Sherman, Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024). His work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, and the Olivia Foundation, Mexico City, Mexico. Read more Toggle Painting