Tuesday, Thursday, and Tiger Balm: Ilham Karim's Reflection on Modern Life
Ilham Karim's paintings at Estyle Art Gallery, Taichung, present figures who feel familiar and enigmatic at once. Their faces are dim, their gazes lowered, their bodies caught in relaxed poses that somehow read as stiff. They seem to be holding back something even they struggle to name. From this point, Karim's second solo exhibition, Tuesday, Thursday, and Tiger Balm, invites visitors into the daily routines that usually pass unnoticed.
The exhibition rests on three conceptual markers reflected in its title. Tuesday and Thursday function as temporal markers, liminal points within the weekly cycle that rarely draw attention. Both evoke a state of suspended fatigue, caught between anticipation and exhaustion, mirroring the emotional rhythm of routine and labor. Tiger Balm, meanwhile, arrives as a pause. Referencing the herbal balm found almost everywhere, this element becomes a metaphor for how one copes, a modest act of self care within an ongoing cycle of pressure and adaptation.
At the center of the exhibition stand Karim's signature figures: detached, unusually calm, and emotionally hard to read. Yet the indifference they project does not signal emptiness. The curatorial text, written by Jasmine Haliza, describes this stance as a deeper relational awareness, a sensitivity to the systems and conditions that quietly govern everyday life. These figures are not shown as individuals but as embodiments of a shared psychological condition shaped by hyperconnectivity, information overload, and the normalization of fatigue in modern life.
Karim extends this inquiry through installation work that combines pipes, measuring tools, and found objects. These elements build a visual language tracing the invisible infrastructure that shapes how we think and decide. The flow of pipes suggests systems of logic and reasoning, while their structural gaps reveal that the common sense we live by is itself a construction, a product of power that lies beyond the reach of individual negotiation.
In his artist statement, Karim writes that social media and digital platforms keep feeding us the latest news from around the world. From a distance, we witness an explosion of global conflict that then seeps into daily life and becomes ordinary. Poverty, unemployment, and social inequality remain normal. Through the information technology at our fingertips, war, geopolitical tension, and decisions made by those in power slowly creep into the rhythm of human life without being noticed. Karim questions how life can be lived normally within a system that says otherwise.
Rather than portraying people as victims or heroes of resistance, the works in this exhibition focus on ordinary bodies trained to remain functional. The body is often shaped by expectations set by authority, even without visible physical pressure. Though the body is often given the freedom to choose, those choices remain vulnerable because they are shaped by algorithms. Karim writes that people lower in the hierarchy become part of a highly vulnerable system, and that we have become commodities for those in power instead of gaining real freedom.
In her curatorial text, Haliza also connects Karim's work to Mark Fisher's thinking on how the frustration of living within bureaucracy and management logic produces a strange kind of resignation, a bitter satisfaction with one's own condition. But unlike Fisher's sharp critique of contemporary culture, painting for Karim works as a cushion, delivering that same coded system with more nuance. The vivid colors in his work are not meant to stimulate minds already overstimulated, but to respond to our own affective reflexes.
The presence of various found objects in the installation becomes a kind of improvisation for Karim, a way to recognize the logic of his own daily life and that of the people around him. He collects objects that feel unfamiliar, simply picks them up, and momentarily releases them from the normal system of everyday life. This simple act sustains a sense of personal agency often forgotten within habitual spaces.
Tuesday, Thursday, and Tiger Balm runs at Estyle Art Gallery, Taichung, from June 13 to August 12, 2026.
