RAINRAIN gallery – Art Spiel

June 1, 2026June 1, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Kosuke Kawahara’s Without Innocence, Dissecting and Reassembling at RAINRAIN Gallery

Stepping into the exhibition Without Innocence at RAINRAIN gallery, you are greeted with a plethora of various mediums, ideas, influences, and experimentations. The paintings carry with them several levels of looking, small details to explore, and multiple dimensions within the edges. The photographs set the scene, allowing you to enter another space just as the paintings do, left to explore the worlds that Kawahara creates and builds within it all. The press release introduces a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, “…we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game (p 28).” This statement lingers alongside my thoughts throughout the exhibition, as I begin to notice more details, connections, and mechanisms that make this exhibition immensely similar to a cyborg in the making. Kawahara takes pieces of the body and fractions of different spaces within the canvas to build something entirely new out of all of these information systems.

Judy Chung: Cafeteria at RAINRAIN

JUDY CHUNG: CAFETERIA AT RAINRAIN
110 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10013, February 13 – March 14, 2026, Wed- Sat, 11 am – 6 pm

RAINRAIN presents Cafeteria, Judy Chung’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring new paintings centered on the school cafeteria as a charged social microcosm. Exploring how identity is formed and negotiated in public, Chung stages collisions between cute and grotesque, sincerity and artifice. Drawing on anime, Baroque drama, and digital image culture, her psychologically charged figures navigate judgment, belonging, and cultural displacement shaped by her transnational upbringing. Spaghetti recurs as an ambiguous symbol of comfort and abjection. Anchored by Symbiosis (Cafeteria) (2025), the exhibition also includes works such as Spaghetti Lariat and Communion, where social ritual, violence, and performance converge.

September 18, 2025September 14, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Maya Perry with introspections within The Moon Takes Shape of an Outsider’s Light

Maya Perry, *The moon takes shape of an outsiders light*, 2025, Water-Soluble Graphite and Watercolor on canvas, 58 x 62 in., photo courtesy of Taylor Bielecki

Maya Perry’s solo exhibition at RAINRAIN gallery is both tender and powerful, full of tranquility and wonder. It is a conversation on humanness and existence. With the drawings, we see snapshots of thoughts, memories, feelings, and with the paintings we see narratives and longer moments of growing, returning, and becoming. This exhibition navigates the spaces where memory fractures and re-forms, dealing with the complications of the past.

July 28, 2024December 7, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Spiritual World at RAINRAIN

Photo story

Installation view, photo courtesy of the gallery

Spiritual World, the title of the current group show at RAINRAIN, references Alfred Stieglitz’s Spiritual America, a 1923 photograph of a harnessed, castrated horse. The powerless restrained stallion—a traditional American symbol of unstoppable prowess—symbolized for Stieglitz the loss of spirituality in his contemporary American culture. The organizer of Spiritual World, Theodor Nymark, a Copenhagen-based artist who also shows work in it, brought together seven artists from Denmark, Korea, and the USA to explore how spirituality can exist today outside conservative religious ideals and ultra-liberal new-age paganism. In a text for the show, Nymark specifies further how he sees spirituality—”like a multifaceted metaphor, many-sided, a prism with no central outpost, only imagination. Not just a lake, a mirror. Not just a car, a vehicle.” These notions reflect the overall premise of this show.