SOM GALLERY is delighted to announce "To the other side", a duo show by Hugh Scott Douglas and Ryota Watanabe on view from May 30 to June 29. This exhibition examines humanity amid an ongoing paradigm shift, through the distinct yet parallel approaches of two artists working within the medium of painting.

Hugh Scott-Douglas (b. 1988 in Cambridge, UK) lives and works in New York. Hugh Scott-Douglas explores authorship, labor, and economic systems through image-making technologies, from 19th-century cyanotypes to cutting-edge AI. His practice often begins with found or　computer-generated imagery and involves both digital and manual manipulation. For example, before printing Scott-Douglas edits using Photoshop and generative image software. He then experiments with printing on diverse materials like textiles or aluminum and hand-paints their surfaces. His works have already been collected by The Dallas Museum of Art, Goetz Collection and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and exhibited in a lot of international exhibitions.

Ryota Watanabe (b. 1998, Saitama, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. Not using the brush, he creates paintings by carving, scraping, and cutting into layers of paint with a self-made cutter. This process, where creation and destruction are inseparable, not only constructs visual order but simultaneously disrupts it. For Watanabe, the resulting “traces of cutting” represent the noise that logic and computation seek to erase in a mechanized, automated society. It is through this noise, he suggests, that the human figure emerges. In his representative series “Stella”, Watanabe works from anonymous digital portraits, connecting calculated lines with chance through the physical act of cutting and paint application. These gestures symbolically depict the ambiguous, unstable condition of contemporary individuals, revealing new 'figures' at the intersection of artificiality and humanity. On the surface, his works reflect human uncertainty and invisibility—images that shift or vanish depending on distance, perception, or mediation through a filter.

This exhibition explores the work of both artists through the lens of how humans relate to—and potentially co-evolve with—mechanization and automation in an era of accelerating technological development. Douglas positions the artist not as a subjective agent, but as a protocol: a structuring logic that governs the relationships, migrations, and recombinations of images, processes, and technical operations. As a practitioner who generates new structures and meanings in the interstices of technology, he constructs an experimental domain—an accumulation of processes where environment, computation, and materiality converge—within the framework of painting.

In contrast, Watanabe approaches the human as a fluctuating structure situated between continuity and discreteness, construction and deviation. Through his drawing practice—an act of creative destruction—he captures subtle traces that escape optimized systems, revealing an alternate world inaccessible to logic or computation. Referencing motifs such as rain streaks in Ukiyo-e, data fragmentation in cloud systems, and Turing’s computational logic, he renders this world through painting.

We look forward to welcoming you to the exhibition.