Isaac Soh Fujita Howell

Isaac Soh Fujita Howell’s paintings have been investigations into twenty-first century discontent, isolationism, and social-media malaise. His compositions often depict stiff, at times cybernetic, figures in a backdrop of dark spaces and tight corridors. Their bodies press, reform, and adapt against pressures exerted by their inhabited landscape and maze-like surroundings. As if forced to adjust to increasing ecological precarity and new urbanism, the figures look resigned to take on aspects of the machine and its architecture for the sake of survival.

Technology is not a welcome tool or step towards utopia; rather, it is a forced evolution amidst the push for total optimization and individual endurance. When the technological apparatus becomes an extension of our ’selves,’ how do we retain what makes us human, and resist subsuming completely into the deadness of machine-hood?

Influenced by surrealist and science-fiction writers like Olaf Stapedon and Vladimir Sorokin, Howell often envisions a loose narrative framework between his paintings to critique the pandemic of anti-humanism and self-isolation.