Mrs Dalloway Said She Would Buy the Flowers Herself:
Fay Ku, Namu Choi, and artists from the collection of Salon de Alpha Contemporary

“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway opens with this sentence. It is the story of a woman in London stepping out to buy flowers for a party, yet the day does not unfold in a linear way. As she walks through the city, fragments of memory intrude without warning, and passing sensations of others intermingle with her own. A single consciousness begins to exist across multiple temporalities at once. What Woolf captures is not the progression of events, but the layering of time itself.

Salon de Alpha Contemporary is an attempt to reconsider such a structure within an interior space. This is not a white cube emptied for exhibition, but a room already inhabited by European antique furniture, everyday objects, and the traces of lived time. The space is not neutralized; what has been here is not erased. The works are placed onto this condition.

The participating artists are East Asian women based in the United States and Japan. Their practices do not originate from a single cultural position. Formed across different languages, locations, and embodied conditions, their sensibilities encounter this space and bring into coexistence European temporality, East Asian perspectives, and the life unfolding here and now—without separating them.

The exhibition extends through the living room, corridor, and bedroom. While connected, these spaces do not share the same condition. The living room opens outward, the corridor holds a momentary pause in movement, and the bedroom turns the gaze inward. The viewer does not follow a fixed sequence, but passes through rooms of differing states.

This exhibition does not seek to complete any single scene. What already exists remains here, together with what has already passed. She said she would buy the flowers herself. That was enough.

 

Fay Ku (b1971, Taiwan) constructs layered figurative images that move between memory, cultural history, and personal mythology. Working primarily with translucent Mylar, drawing, and painting, she overlays fragments of imagery that seem at once familiar and displaced, combining East Asian references with Western art historical forms.

Her works often recall the structure of classical portraiture or religious painting, yet the figures remain psychologically distant and difficult to fully locate within a single cultural narrative. Rather than presenting stable identities, the images unfold as ambiguous presences shaped through migration, memory, and the circulation of images across different histories and geographies.

Within Salon de Alpha Contemporary, Fay Ku’s works enter quietly into the interior, where antique furniture, domestic atmosphere, and accumulated time already coexist. The paintings do not seek to dominate the space, but instead alter its emotional and perceptual balance with subtle tension, allowing the familiar room to drift gradually into another psychological state.

 

Namu Choi (b. 1978, Korea) explores psychological tension and emotional reactions that emerge between human beings and their surrounding environments through painting. Bold colors, layered surfaces, and densely accumulated textures reveal emotional states shaped by anxiety, intimacy, and distance.

Within Salon de Alpha Contemporary, her works introduce a vivid color and sensory energy into the interior. Set against accumulated time, antique furniture, and domestic stillness, the paintings quietly disturb the atmosphere of the room while simultaneously becoming absorbed into it, producing a subtle tension between lived space and emotional intensity.

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■𝗘𝘅𝗵𝗶𝗯𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 

・Duration｜May12 - June 20 2026

・Venue｜Salon de Alpha Contemporary, Tokyo

・Invitation Only

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・Inquiry｜infoalphacontemporary@gmail.com