UNSAYABLE is the opening exhibition of Loy Luo Space for 2026, exploring forms of experience that cannot be fully expressed, explained, or stabilized by language.
Historically, the unsayable marked the inner limits of thought—the tension between what can be named and what resists naming. Today, it increasingly exists within language itself, obscured by information overload and the excess of speech.
In an era where expression is constant and visibility appears guaranteed, meaning is not prohibited but covered over. Serious thought and critical value are not erased, but submerged.
Artists and Practices
Artist Loy Luo, founder of Loy Luo Space, works across painting, sculpture, writing, and curatorial practice. Sustaining an intensive artistic site in the center of New York, her work moves between abstraction, material gesture, and conceptual structure. In Unsayable, her works appear quietly yet decisively, maintaining tension rather than explanation.
Writer Jonathan Goodman participates as an exhibiting artist rather than a commentator. Through poetry readings and the material presence of text, his contribution places writing under the same pressures as visual practice, allowing language itself to enter the condition of the unsayable.
Architect and photographer Sun-Chang Lo, originally from Taiwan and long based in Hong Kong, presents photographs shaped by sustained observation rather than spectacle. His images retain hesitation and ambiguity within restrained visual structures.
Robert Solomon’s work centers on process and materiality, moving between painting, printmaking, and photographic approaches. His paintings evolve through the formation and disruption of material rules, resisting narrative clarity and delaying meaning. Language remains present, yet never fully arrives.
Karen Schwartz’s paintings and mixed-media works focus on moments when recognition begins to fail. Through repetition and interruption, her works sustain uncertainty rather than resolve it. As a practicing clinical psychologist, her sensitivity to emotional accumulation
Conclusion
The future of the artistic ecosystem may prove more difficult than we anticipate. Pressures from institutions, technology, and attention economies may reduce active engagement in artistic creation, viewing, reading, and serious reflection, even discouraging the articulation of personal experience.
In such a context, we continue to need forces that help reestablish our relationship with art and with thinking itself. Only time will reveal the direction ahead. But at this moment, Unsayable stands with those experiences that have not yet been simplified, consumed, or fully spoken.
Opening Reception
January 16, 2026
6:00 – 8:00 PM
Loy Luo Space
101 Lafayette Street
New York, NY 10013