Giant Robot is proud to host Playful Extremities, a group show featuring new works by Louise Chen, Hellen Jo, Sara Antoinette Martin, Tran Nguyen, and Sylvia Park.

Although Louise Chen is freshly graduated from UC Santa Cruz’s art program, her work is uncommonly diverse and realized. She transfers the clean, effortless lines of her etchings and woodcuts to her drawing, seamlessly inserting them into otherworldly landscapes rendered with equal craft and tremendous atmosphere.

Hellen Jo was born in Starkville, MS in 1983 and lived in Florida and New Mexico, but is firmly entrenched in Northern California, where she plays in indie bands and makes indie comics. Her style is loose but attentive—as evidenced in her full-color issues of Jin & Jam, which combine the raw humor and honesty of underground comix with the precision of alternative manga.

Brooklyn-based Sara Antoinette Martin takes familiar subjects of cryptozoology, symbols of Freemasonry, and tattoo flash art and presents them in highly graphic and surreal forms. The bold arrangement of commonly-known-but-mysterious imagery forces viewers to revisit their preconceptions about truth, legend, and aesthetics.

The surreal art of Tran Nguyen has a faded, antique look, but the subjects are timeless.The Savannah, GA-based artist depicts young, beautiful subjects in dark settings—surrounded by melancholy and/or ectoplasm, if not actually emitting them from their pores. The effect is strangely hypnotic and hauntingly beautiful.

Sylvia Park is a New York City-based artist who depicts an imperfect real world with perfect lines. Using only contours, she is able to create out hyper real scenes with depth and feeling. Her precision line work is highly effective for editorial purposes publications, but wavers just enough to convey subtle emotion and urge closer viewing in a gallery setting.

Giant Robot was born as a Los Angeles-based magazine about Asian, Asian-American, and new hybrid culture in 1994, but has evolved into a full-service pop culture provider with shops and galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, as well as an online equivalent.