Opening Moves
Group Exhibition
August 17 - 26, 2025
Address: 547 W 27TH ST. #428 (4th FL), NEW YORK, NY 10001
Opening Reception: August 21 (Thursday) from 6 to 8 PM
New York, NY – Roundcube Contemporary announces the group exhibition, "Opening Moves," curated by Albert Abdul-Barr Wang and Julie Jang.
“Problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Poems and Problems
'Opening Moves,' which is our inaugural group show located at 547 W 27th St. #428 (4th Floor) New York City, NY 10001, focuses on various artists who focus on the artistic process as part of their overall practice. With different approaches similar to the wide variety of chess openings, these artists examine how their driving concepts like gambits or en passants turn into materialized or dematerialized objects for the gallery space. We are proud to present the following artists:
Evan Hume
Matthew DeStefano
Callianne Jones
Allison Field Bell
Chunbum Park
John Dewey
Jessica Goehring
Ross Edward Doyle
Mark Andrew
Sabrina Puppin
Sangho Han
Jina Kwon
Sarah Fuhrman
Reuben Merringer
Sia Sangbok Lee
Jong Rim Song
Sangnam Park
Dasha Bazanova
These artists all share a strong visual strategy which informs their own output rooted in the balance between concept and craftsmanship. This show is a snapshot of today’s multifaceted artistic languages across varied geographies and many generations.
The metaphor to the game of chess describes the artists' ideation and the creation processes, which consist of steps, decisions, and moves, each reacting to the subsequent one. Ultimately, the artistic process can be conceived as a game or a form of struggle with oneself (in terms of one's limit), or it can also be thought of as a study that expands the field or the game.
The trajectory of the game, whether white or black wins, is essentially equivalent to the measure of the success of the artwork being produced through the creative process. If one were to equate black as success and white as failure, or vice versa, then checkmate would be when the creative process stops, with the artwork as either as success or failure. The player having more valuable pieces intact on the board would equate to a stronger artwork, perhaps. The moves can consist of mixing applying the right colors, building the correct forms, or achieving a balanced or dynamic composition.
In 'Opening Moves,' the important part may be the first series of moves and the first set of decisions or actions in the creative process. The initial move, while limited in number, determines the subsequent series of moves that culminate in the final outcome of the game. Most of the time, the opening moves are rudimentary: it is the advancing of the pawn one or two steps forward, just as the artist primes a canvas with a particular color or draws a basic outline or sketch.
The concept of 'Opening Moves' predicates a multi-layered and multi-stepped process of making, just as chess games often become grueling duels that never end. The metaphor of artmaking as a competitive game like chess reveals the necessity of strategy, rules, and planning in art. The trick is to know exactly when the artwork is complete, to bring in the finishing move and call "checkmate!"
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Exhibition Checklist:
Mark Andrew is a mixed media visual artist based in New York, originally from Nebraska. His work draws inspiration from the open landscapes of the Midwestern plains, contrasted with expanding infrastructure, industrial remnants, and elements of pop culture and nostalgia. Working across diverse materials, Andrew uses saturated color and texture to navigate complex visual languages that reflect both inner and outer environments.
His current practice revisits the elemental aspects of mark-making and natural exploration, engaging liminal terrain and ecological concerns as metaphors for personal longing and existential tension. He also draws inspiration from excavators, warehouses, and utilitarian structures—interpreting them as archaeological remnants of modern life.
Matthew DeStefano was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He received his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. He lives and works in Albany, NY.
John Dewey is a painter (b. Denver, Colorado 1989) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. John graduated Art Center College of Design in 2012 with a BFA in Fine Art and continued his studio practice while working in fabrication and education. In 2023 he was accepted as an MFA candidate at Claremont Graduate University and received a degree in 2025. His work focuses on environmental issues that affect the western United States. Working in a combination of painting and sculpture to unpack issues around water scarcity, pesticide use, increasing prevalence of wildfires as well as other effects of human caused climate change that pose an existential threat to life and ecology in the west. The work explores the history of exploitation and engineering and the ways in which it has permanently altered the landscape.
Ross Edward Doyle is originally from Oregon, currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA from CalArts.
Allison Field Bell is a multi-genre writer and artist originally from northern California but currently living in Salt Lake City, Utah. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University, and she is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Utah. Her debut poetry collection, All That Blue, is forthcoming in 2026, and she is the author of two chapbooks, Edge of the Sea and Without Woman or Body. Her photographs have been featured in various exhibitions and have been published in The Madison Review, Fugue, and Alligator Juniper. Find more of her work at allisonfieldbell.com.
Sarah Fuhrman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her works have been shown throughout NYC, along the East coast and in LA. Her mixed media paintings blend figurations into cohesive & prolific, inner-worlds of exploratory maps and textural terrains. In all her works, imaginative or composite selves are woven into momentary glimpses of her psyche. Her work calls from memories housed within a deeply set past. Through her reverence and yearning for the natural world, Fuhrman uses repetitive brush strokes that mimic the lushness of flora & fauna, or the playful messiness of a good sort of dirt and grime. Her often wild and sweeping gestural abstractions show a breadth of forcefulness which simultaneously complicate and compliment her highly personal figurative based dream works. Her work playfully hearkens to the outside world at large & its humorous or mythic sentimentalities.
Jessica Goehring’s work explores the interplay between personal technology, physical space, and perception, crafting immersive environments that shift and evolve in response to their surroundings. Inspired by the Light and Space Movement, she bridges digital and analog mediums, combining AI-generated imagery, personal snapshots, and delicate layers of organza to create dynamic compositions that transform with light, and motion. Her works challenge the static nature of art, offering ephemeral experiences that invite viewers to question the permanence of reality in our digital age.
Recent exhibitions include Cupped at the Wolford House, Ghost Loop at Malvoyante, REDACTED Art Fair in Lincoln heights, Aurora Borealis curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, suspended, unsited at Foyer-LA, and End Demo at Epoch Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in the German publication GalleryTalk for her 2020 NFT Project and for End demo at Epoch Gallery. Goehring is a recent recipient of the Art on the Outside Public Sculpture grant provided by The City of West Hollywood in Los Angeles.
Sangho Han, born in Seoul, South Korea in 1991 and currently residing and working in Long Island City, NY, holds a BFA from Gachon University (2016) and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (2023). He is currently represented by Roundcube Contemporary in New York City, NY.
Evan Hume is an artist and educator based in Ames, Iowa where he is Assistant Professor of Photography at Iowa State University. He earned his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA from George Washington University. Raised in the Washington, DC area, Hume’s approach to photography is informed by the experience of living in the nation’s political center for much of his life and critically examines the medium’s use as an instrument of the military-industrial complex. He has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions and his work has been featured by publications such as Aperture, Der Greif, Financial Times, and Fisheye. Hume’s first monograph, Viewing Distance, was published by Daylight Books in 2021 and his second book, Critical Collection, will be published in 2025.
Callianne Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in environmental documentation as it relates to contemporary geospatial dynamics. Using a research-based approach, she investigates the contextualization of ever-changing terrains through photographic means. Through her work, she explores the mutual imprints individuals and the environment leave on one another, creating work that engages with both the material and conceptual traces of these interactions. Jones holds an MFA from the University of Southern California. She is a recent fellow at the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and artist-in-residence at the Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability. She is currently represented by Roundcube Contemporary in New York City, NY.
Jina Kwon specializes in fine art and expresses her life through her paintings. She graduated from SungShin Women’s University in Seoul, S. Korea, where she majored in fine Arts. She is currently represented by Roundcube Contemporary in New York City, NY.
Sia Sangbok Lee is a graduate of universities both in Korea and the US. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions as well as art fairs in the US and abroad. This notable artist has received many national awards including a Japan Osaka Contest Gold Prize and the Korea Peace Contribution Grand Prize.
Reuben Merringer is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and educator. His current work threads a lineage through the process-based exploration of materials, often resulting from natural phenomena and historical references to language. He recently co-curated the group exhibition “CHIMERA’D” with Li Zeng for Phase Gallery in Los Angeles. He is editing his first novel.
Chunbum Park (Korean alphabet: 박준범, Chinese characters: 朴準範), also known as Chun, is an artist from South Korea, where they were born in 1991. They received their BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2020 and their MFA in Fine Arts Studio from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2022, where they changed their pronouns. Born a male, Park likes to cross dress and depicts themselves as a woman in their paintings. They are the inventor of the ArtBid art auction card game. In 2023, Park began writing exhibition reviews for various online and print magazines, including the New Visionary Magazine. They currently reside in Cliffside Park, New Jersey.
Sabrina Puppin, an Italian artist by birth and a cosmopolitan by choice, lives between Qatar and New York. After a distinguished academic career, with a PhD in African Art Studies and a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts, throughout her professional career she has managed to balance teaching and prestigious roles in museums and galleries with her work as an artist, to which she now dedicates herself fully. Her career, like a timeline, is marked by a perpendicular, a decisive shift, from a consolidated realism to abstraction, abandoning herself to experimentation.
Sabrina Puppin has received numerous prestigious awards for her artistic merit, including the 2025 New Great Masters International Award, New York, USA; the 2025 GIOTTO International Prize, Florence, Italy; the 2024 Pegasus International Award, Venice, Italy; the 2023 Donatello Prize, Florence, Italy; the 2023 Leonardo Da Vinci International Prize, Museum of Science and Technology, Milan, Italy; the 2022 Paris International Prize; and the 2018 Luxemburg Art Prize for Artistic Achievement, Pinacotheque Museum, Luxembourg, among others. She was selected as an Artist-in-Residence for Expo 2015, representing Qatar at the prestigious event in Milan, Italy. Additionally, she was awarded two residencies at the Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan, Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2013 and 2014. The residencies were organized by the Turquoise Mountain Institute and Qatar Museums Authority.
Born and raised in rural South Korea, Jong Rim Song developed an early, intuitive connection to the rhythms, colors, and textures of nature. After graduating from Hong Ik University, he moved to France, spending a year in Paris and traveling through neighboring European countries, immersing himself in Western art and culture. During this period, he became particularly drawn to German Neo-Expressionism and Appropriation Art. In 1991, Song relocated to the United States and earned his M.A. from New York University in 1995. Over the past three decades, he has created experimental works that weave together Eastern and Western sensibilities, employing diverse materials and techniques such as dripping, decalcomania, bricolage, and collage.
A signature element of his practice is the use of marbles—small glass spheres cherished from his Korean childhood—embedded into wooden panels layered with painted imagery and collage. Their reflective and light-transmitting qualities create shifting colors, forms, and dimensions that change with the viewer’s perspective. Guided by intuition and open to chance, Song’s works embody the interplay between material, environment, and memory, reflecting both his personal history and the ever-changing beauty of the world around him.
Sangnam Park focuses on the accidental traces and gaps, resembling stains and scratches, found on roads or the surfaces of walls. The artist searches for traces of human life amidst the myriad of marks and remnants left behind in the streets. Roads serve as the foundation on which people tread and stand. Thus, Park collects the journeys of all individuals left in the footprints taken step by step on the road. He then extracts the coincidental and inevitable traces and scars inherent in humans from the streets and reconstructs them into paintings. The materials in his works vary; the artist uses paper, cement, and gold leaf on canvas to abstractly express traces of life. His method of scraping off layers of colors built up as the underlying work on the canvas with only the movement of his hands embodies the flow of time and subtle changes inherent in life's journey. Occasionally visible at the center of his works, the golden sculptures seem to represent hope occasionally encountered on the journey of life. Through exploring the hidden side of the streets, Park contemplates the joys and sorrows of life, aiming to remind viewers of the importance of life once again.
Park graduated from Hansung University's Western Painting Department and the Versailles School of Fine Arts in France. He has held over 20 solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions both domestically and internationally, including a solo exhibition at Gallery HUUE Singapore in 2013. He has received awards such as the Seoul Art Exhibition Art Award in 1987, the French Beaux-Arts Jury Competition in 1992, and the Culture and Arts Award in 2012.