SOM GALLERY is delighted to announce "In particular”, duo exhibition curated by James Bae on view from April 17 to May 17.

There is not a field in academics so similar yet epistemically different than mathematics. Look at it this way: one half, applied maths, underpins the everyday pragmatics that create the stability of a bridge; the structural execution of discrete code that runs global banking systems; or regulates the fractional　amounts of ingredients to, say, make an average morning omelette. The other half has no basic function -hence no practical utility- to be useful to anything apart from providing a glimpse to its own pre-existing state of being. Pure mathematics cannot mean anything other than reflective of itself, in actuality; and it is why you receive a bachelor’s or other degrees in this math in the arts rather than in the sciences.

Many mathematicians, then, will tell you that the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture (now called the Modularity theorem after the conjecture’s proving), originally proposed by Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura in 1955, is the most startling problem posed in all of modern mathematics. At its premise, the conjecture proposed the singularity between two disparate fields of math, elliptical curves and modular forms, then thought to be wholly incompatible with one another (how does the geometry of a plain donut in front of you also is a donut that equally exists as a highly-symmetric functional form in the fourth dimension, and vice versa, and by nature?). At once maddeningly dense and thought to be otherwise unsolvable, the sudden loss of one of its authors and his fiancée further added to the problem’s opaque renown. It is hard, then, to separate the history of the problem with the problems imposed by one’s very own nature - of them being endlessly creative prospects on their own, however linked by each’s enigmatic slenderness.

A conjecture itself is just a thought. It is not there apart as a suggestion of a validation that may or may not be there at the end of one’s efforts; its profit is the further issuing of uncertainties, successfully achieved or not. There are no rules as to why one would take on a problem like Taniyama-Shimura or anything else apart from one wants or one needs to do. Perhaps, this is another way to think of it in the hopefully elucidating way of a peripheral. I once asked a mathematician familiar with the conjecture if he could explain it to me in simple words. After a long pause, he quietly said “no.” A further longer pause and the finishing of his coffee led to him asking if we could order another. It was getting late into the day as people filtered in and out of the tables when he said, as if to himself, “I don’t know any other way to describe the feeling of thinking of the conjecture, as it must have in the 1950s, as other than my being a painter in a dark, isotropic space, with no fixed axis, and no particular plane I could paint upon let alone see. I am going through my mind not-painting and painting my very own mistakes in the dark not knowing what I’ll arrive to,” he said. “The nature is there the way the grass and the air around us are.”

(text by James Bae)

Roger White graduated from Yale University and received his M.F.A. from Columbia University. White has had recent solo gallery exhibitions at LABOR in Mexico City, MX; Uffner & Lin in New York, NY; and Grice Bench in Los Angeles. White is included in permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Booth Collection at the University of Chicago, IL, amongst others. He is also the author of The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World, published by Bloomsbury Books.
Ryota Watanabe was born in Saitama in 1998. After completing his master's degree at the Tokyo University of the Arts of Fine Arts in 2023, currently based in Tokyo, he makes and shows his works.Major solo exhibitions include "Reflection (Times)" at SOM GALLERY (Tokyo, 2024), and Major group exhibitions include "ACTUAL NOTES" at Roland Anselmi (Rome, 2026), "To the other side” at SOM GALLERY (Tokyo, 2025), "Soft Focus" at The Hole (Los Angeles, 2025), "MONOLITH" at NANZUKA 2G (Tokyo, 2024) and "Eudaemonia" at Gallery Common (Tokyo, 2024).