Exhibition Opening Reception: Paul Robas & Yongqi Tang

Make Room is excited to host the opening reception for two solo exhibitions: Almost There by Paul Robas and Strange Tales by Yongqi Tang.

Robas' paintings have the quality of memory — intimate but loose, built from fragments of moments that feel like stories passed down through family. There are faces that seem like relatives you never knew, gestures caught somewhere between sleep and waking, still lifes that carry a familiar strangeness. His canvases hold a quiet tension, pulling your attention both inward and outward. They ask you to sit with presence, with loss, with the way time seems to stretch and compress in a single brushstroke.

Yongqi Tang (b. 1997, China; based in Seattle) takes a different approach, using her work to examine identity as something we perform and narrate. Working in oil and charcoal, she looks at how identities — gender, nationality, the self we're born into versus the one we construct — get built up, taken apart, and reimagined. Her paintings draw on both Chinese and Western visual traditions, pulling apart mythology, memory, and lived experience to create layered scenes that make you reconsider how we see ourselves and each other.

Both artists bring real empathy to what they do — Robas through familiarity and recollection, Tang through the shifting, contested territory of identity and myth. Together, their work opens up a conversation about presence: how we remember, who we become, what's left when we strip away the frame.

Come by for the opening — there will be drinks, good conversation, and a chance to see two distinctive bodies of work side by side.