New Folk Tales｜Group Exhibition
Stories Told by Contemporary Characters.
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Before the birth of mythology, humanity understood the unknown through stories. Today, new stories continue to unfold, only the gods, heroes, and monsters within them have long since taken on contemporary forms.
Neverland Gallery presents the international group exhibition "New Folk Tales," bringing together six contemporary artists from the Philippines and Indonesia: Andres Catig, Decki ‘LEOS’ Firmansah, KB Lucero, Nav Matito, RAKI, and VANTABLACK ZILCH. Spanning diverse generations and creative backgrounds—including painting, architecture, engineering, street culture, music, and multimedia practice—these six artists share a common choice: using "characters" as a medium to enter the world. Through the concept of "New Folk Tales," this exhibition seeks to rethink: in an era of rapid global cultural flow where the virtual and reality overlap, what kind of new stories are we creating? And what kind of characters will our era leave behind?
Folk tales have never been merely fantasy. The spirits, monsters, animals, and heroes told and retold throughout history actually carry the fears, desires, beliefs, and collective memories of an era.
The characters in "New Folk Tales" are no different. They may be born from childhood memories, anime, video games, internet culture, and pop symbols, or they may stem from urban life, personal anxieties, identity, or even the artists’ gaze upon death, loneliness, and existence. These characters are no longer just protagonists in a frame; they become an alternative body through which the artist projects their own experiences and observations of the world.
Andres Catig transforms observations of life, dreams, illness, and death into vibrant, heterogeneous clusters of organisms, making the grotesque a visual language for exploring the human psyche and state of existence; Decki ‘LEOS’ Firmansah draws on a deep background in painting and comic culture to construct allegorical worlds populated by animals, figures, and symbolic characters, creating a new collision between traditional narrative and contemporary pop visuals.
KB Lucero, with a multifaceted perspective as an engineer, architect, and multimedia creator, extracts ghostly, both familiar and alien forms from daily life and philosophical contemplation, discussing memory, the self, and the human experience within quiet, suspenseful imagery. Nav Matito traverses the boundary between fiction and reality, drawing nourishment from anime, internet culture, video games, and memory, using dreamlike characters to harbor emotions of loneliness, hope, nostalgia, and the desire to be understood—these beings, non-existent in reality, instead reflect the most genuine humanity.
RAKI begins from childhood memories, pop culture, and traditional elements, using vivid colors and a simple, accessible character lexicon to reconnect nostalgia, identity, and contemporary life; VANTABLACK ZILCH brings street art, skateboarding, anime, and music culture onto the canvas, utilizing the visual energy of abstract expressionism and pop art to transform the speed, rhythm, and subculture of the city into dynamic contemporary imagery.
The worlds of these six artists are distinct: some are bright and innocent, others dark and unsettling; some characters are like childhood friends, while others resemble nameless monsters from the depths of the subconscious.
However, when they appear together in "New Folk Tales," they form a contemporary fable with no fixed beginning or end.
These characters do not belong to a distant "once upon a time," but were born in this very moment we are experiencing. They collect the fragments of the internet generation, the loneliness of urban life, the lingering shadows of childhood, and the ineffable emotions faced in an rapidly changing world. Perhaps centuries from now, when people look back at today, anime, memes, virtual avatars, street iconography, and the strange lives created by these artists will become cultural clues to understanding our era, much like the myths and legends of the past.
"New Folk Tales" is not a retelling of old stories, but an invitation for the viewer to step into a contemporary mythological world currently in the making.
Here, every character is a story, and every work is an unfinished legend. And when a viewer sees their own memories, emotions, and imagination reflected in a strange character, a new folk tale begins.