New Folk Tales｜Group Exhibition
Stories Told by Contemporary Characters.
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Before myths were born, people understood the unknown through stories; today, new stories continue to unfold, only the deities, heroes, and monsters within them have long since adopted contemporary guises.
Neverland Gallery presents "New Folk Tales," a group exhibition featuring six contemporary artists from the Philippines and Indonesia: Andres Catig, Decki ‘LEOS’ Firmansah, KB Lucero, Nav Matito, RAKI, and VANTABLACK ZILCH. These six artists come from different generations and creative backgrounds, spanning painting, architecture, engineering, street culture, music, and mixed-media practices, yet they collectively choose "characters" as a way to engage with the world. This exhibition, based on the concept of "new folk tales," attempts to re-examine: In an era of rapid global cultural flow and the intertwining of virtual and reality, what kind of new stories are we creating? And what kind of characters will our era leave behind?
Folk tales have never been mere fantasy. The elves, monsters, animals, and heroes repeatedly narrated actually carry the fears, desires, beliefs, and collective memories of an era.
The characters in "New Folk Tales" are no different. They may originate from childhood memories, anime, video games, internet culture, and pop symbols, or they may stem from urban life, personal anxieties, identity, and even the artists' contemplation of death, solitude, and existence. Characters are no longer just protagonists in a scene, but become another body through which artists project their own experiences and observe the world.
Andres Catig transforms observations of life, dreams, illness, and death into vibrant, alien-like biological portraits, making the grotesque a visual language for exploring human psychology and states of existence; Decki ‘LEOS’ Firmansah, with a deep background in painting and comic culture, constructs an allegorical world among animals, figures, and symbolic characters, creating new collisions between traditional narratives and contemporary pop aesthetics.
KB Lucero, with the multifaceted perspectives of an engineer, architectural background, and multimedia creator, extracts ghostly, familiar yet strange forms from everyday life and philosophical contemplation, discussing memory, self, and human experience within quiet and suspenseful scenes. Nav Matito, on the other hand, navigates between fiction and reality, drawing inspiration from anime, internet culture, video games, and memory, conveying emotions of loneliness, hope, nostalgia, and a desire to be understood through dreamlike characters—lives that do not exist in reality, but instead reflect the truest humanity.
RAKI starts from childhood memories, pop culture, and traditional elements, using vibrant colors and concise, approachable character language to reconnect nostalgia, identity, and contemporary life; VANTABLACK ZILCH brings street art, skateboarding, anime, and music culture to the canvas, transforming the speed, rhythm, and subculture of the city into dynamic contemporary images through abstract expression and pop art's visual energy.
The worlds of the 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.
Yet, when they appear together in "New Folk Tales," they form a contemporary allegory without a fixed beginning or end.
These characters do not belong to a distant "once upon a time," but are born in the present moment we are experiencing. They collect fragments of the internet generation, the loneliness of urban life, the afterimages of childhood, and the ineffable emotions faced in a rapidly changing world. Perhaps hundreds of years from now, when people look back at today, anime, memes, virtual characters, street images, and the strange lives created by artists will also become cultural clues to understanding this era, just like the myths and legends of the past.
"New Folk Tales" is not about retelling ancient stories, but about inviting viewers into a contemporary mythological world in the making.
Here, every character is a story, and every artwork is an unfinished legend. And when viewers see their own memories, emotions, and imagination reflected in a strange character, a new folk tale begins.
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