Here and There by Tim Guan

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The Triton Museum of Art presents Here and There (August 22, 2026 - January 17, 2027) by Tim Guan. Tim Guan was the Best of Show winner of the 2025 Salon at the Triton: A 2D Art Competition & Exhibition with his selected artwork, George, Doomscrolling (2024)

Tim Guan is a San Francisco-based, figurative oil painter whose art is influenced by his life and his background in technology. For as long as he could remember, art has been an integral part of his identity and remained that way even through his earlier career. As someone who has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over a decade, Tim Guan has borne witness to the high-speed changes of public and private life, either as a direct result of digital innovation or a byproduct of it. Once a “true believer” in the promises of the tech industry, his paintings aid him in exploring his complex feelings regarding his personal complicity in these changes as they sit alongside his critiques of them. After finding ways to remain committed to his art during the COVID-19 pandemic, Guan left the tech industry in 2025 to be a full-time artist. 

Tim Guan’s upcoming exhibition, Here and There, presents a collection of works that examines our relationship to embodied experience. The digital world has become inseparable from our everyday life, affecting the way we keep in touch with our loved ones, to the way we choose our next meal, down to how we develop and foster relationships. Here and There represents the internet granting us the ability to essentially be “here and there,” in multiple places at once, but being less present than ever. “As so much of our lives shift online, the body can come to feel less like an essential dimension of the self and more like something to be managed, optimized, or transcended altogether,” Guan states. 

With nearly unfettered access to the world around us, in many ways it creates fractures in our socialization and ability to develop certain types of connections. The figures in Guan’s pieces speak to the various conditions we find ourselves in and how they negotiate their bids for connection.

Guan’s exhibition offers these questions for viewers: What remains unique, meaningful, or irreplaceable about physical experience? What is worth noticing, preserving, and honoring about life in a body? 

Tim Guan’s work has been exhibited around the Bay Area at Wessling Contemporary, Decentered Arts Studio, The Drawing Room, Rosebud Gallery, and the Triton Museum of Art. You can learn more on Tim’s website and socials at timguan.art.

Here and There by Tim Guan will be on view in the Triton Museum of Art’s Rotunda Gallery starting August 22nd, 2026.