With his chunky black glasses and buttoned tweed jacket, vest, and tie, Tattfoo Tan is the picture of a New York gallery owner. But any trace of arty haughtiness quickly disappears behind his frequent wide grin. Mr. Tan is quick to point out that just because the art displayed in the pristine white rooms is hanging in a gallery, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily “good,” at least, not by everyone’s standards.

“We try to encourage people to see art and have a dialogue, and not be afraid that what you see on the wall has to be good,” Mr. Tan said. “You can say, ‘I don’t understand it, I don’t like it.’ You can talk to the artist, argue about it, make conversation.”

The Tattfoo Gallery isn’t in Chelsea, or even Manhattan. It takes up half of a converted 19th-century livery stable on a quiet, leafy street in the historic St. George neighborhood of Staten Island, across from P.S. 16 and down the block from a street lined with small Mexican groceries, dollar stores, Polish and Korean delis, barber shops, and Sri Lankan restaurants. It is about a 10-minute walk from the Staten Island ferry, making it more accessible to Manhattan than many of the island’s more suburban neighborhoods.

The gallery’s latest show, which opened over the weekend, is as unique as the space’s location.

Compiled from the work of 32 artists, the exhibition takes up only two walls and a third of the gallery. The one requirement to be considered for “XS” was that the pieces be 5″x5″ or less. Not just small. Extra small.

The art ranges from small photographs and paintings to a tiny sugarcoated house on stilts. The pieces’ diminutive sizes not only make them unique, they are also affordable, running from $50 to $850.

Mr. Tan’s wife, Ensze, who manages the 2-year-old gallery and curated the show, got the idea for it while she was viewing the El Greco exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“She was amazed by these big, huge paintings, but she was attracted the most to the tiniest little thing” – a small portrait worn around the neck or wrist with a lock of hair. “Everyone just walked past it, but she paid a little more attention.”

“XS,” which runs through December 19, is one of two shows currently installed in the gallery. In the space’s main large room is “HER-story,” a collection of works by three female artists: Allison Hawkings, Anette Jacque, and Lee Anne Swanson-Peet. Mr. Tan said none of the women knew each other, but he saw a similar autobiographical thread in all of their work and gathered their pieces together to complement each other. That is one of his main goals: connecting like-minded artists with each other and the general public.

Ten of the artists in “XS” live in Staten Island, and one is a teacher in the school across the street.

“It’s the dialogue between them that makes art interesting and transforms it to another level,” he said. “Other galleries that have been established for a long time cater to what their clients need. Which is okay, because after all it’s a retail environment. We’re all doing retail, even though it seems to be a sacred institution sometimes.”

Behind a door in the gallery is where Mr. Tan creates his own work. He is not only the gallery’s founder, but he is also an artist himself, creating big, nature inspired works in the studio he shares with Ensze and their dog, Brian, a sweet-tempered pitbull-dalmation mix.

Mr. Tan’s works line the walls – large canvases he has soaked with alcohol and then dripped with oils to create abstract, earthy floating images of lotus flowers, bonsai trees, bamboo, and poppies. Others, also inspired by nature, combine the techniques of Chinese calligraphy with a variety of media, including iridescent paint, acrylic, and glitter.

The paintings in this series, called “Tanah Air” reflect Mr. Tan’s Chinese and Malaysian heritage, he says. The bonsai tree signifies “grace under pressure…. It means that when you’ve been cut and are being pruned, and actually you’re hurting, you grow more gracefully through the process.” The lotus leaf, on the other hand “is growing up from this very dirty place, a background that’s not suitable for something that is very spiritual, but it turns out to be this beautiful plant,” Mr. Tan says.

Thirty-five of his “Tanah Air” paintings were featured in a solo exhibition at the Paul Sharpe Gallery in TriBeCa earlier this year, and another is currently on view at the Peng Gallery in Philadelphia.

The paintings in another of Mr. Tan’s series, “The Secret Garden,” are much more sparse and geometric – some in black and white, others in color – with intertwined organic shapes that Mr. Tan says symbolizes the gardens he grew up with in Malaysia crossed with New York’s “concrete jungle.”

The artist says Isamu Noguchi, whose work is currently being showcased in an exhibition at the Whitney Gallery, is one of Mr. Tan’s heroes.

“Like me, he’s a mixture of East and West; he’s trapped between his two worlds,” he said. “He’d take a rock and see how he could enhance it and let it weather in nature and see what it reflects back. It’s a very Zen philosophy, even though both of us are not Zen practitioners. It’s the culture, I guess.”

Mr. Tan, who is 30, grew up in Malaysia and began painting when he was 6, studying with the family of Yong Mun Seng, a pioneer watercolorist in Southeast Asia. That was the extent of the artist’s fine art training. He graduated from college with a degree in graphic design and still has a successful day job as a graphic artist. It was his work with Bozell and other design firms, branding such companies as Equinox and Sotheby’s, that brought him to New York from Kuala Lumpur.

The Tans moved to America four years ago and first lived in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at the center of a thriving artist community, until the neighborhoods became so popular they could no longer afford to live there. They researched different areas and settled on St. George, where they could rent a large, stunning gallery and studio space within a quiet but close community. They save the heat for the gallery, but as more and more people discover Mr. Tan’s art, soon they may be able to splurge for the studio’s heating bills, which are hefty because of three drafty skylights that illuminate the large work and living space. The studio, save for the large paintings, is stylishly Spartan, with a vintage table and chairs sharing the space with a white couch and shag rug.

Mr. Tan says he has a hard time describing what it is he “does,” so he settles for the term “creative chameleon” -graphic design during the day, working on the gallery at night, and painting “seasonally,” when the impulse hits him.

“I’m not one of those painters who say I have to paint every day of every week,” he says. “I paint when the idea is there. And the rest of the time it doesn’t mean I’m not painting, I’m just taking in information and inspiration.”