Realities of Ignorance

Introduction

Artists' Profile

 

Wang Yu-Hsuan

Wang Yu-Hsuan (b. 1987) was born in Hualien, Taiwan. She holds a master’s degree in Art Direction, Graphic Art and Digital Design from ESAG Penninghen, Paris. She now lives and works in Shanghai, China.

Wang has worked as a graphic designer in both Paris and Shanghai, and has been creating art at the same time. While working as a designer, she has gradually shifted to painting as her way of expression. During more than seven years of time in France, the abundance of museum exhibitions had a tremendous impact on her and kindled her interest in natural history. Consequently, she began incorporating illustration, specimens, and peculiar creatures into her work. She is fond of delineating natural ecology, evolution, and behaviors from an observer’s perspective, and utilizes drawing to reconstruct living beings to create new images. Meanwhile, her work discusses individual creatures and ecosystems, along with their relationship with other species. For this reason, stories about nature and land have often become the focus and theme of her work as well. She was the mural painter in the exhibition, The Tales from Where the Land Emerged, which was the Hualien Pavilion at the 2021 Creative Expo Taiwan. The exhibition was awarded the Red Dot Design Award (Germany), the Good Design Award (Japan), and “Best Design” at the Golden Pin Design Award (Taiwan).

Wang has held her solo exhibition, Jungles, at Decryption Room (Hualien, 2018); her recent group exhibitions include the Asia Illustration Fair (Powerlong Art Museum, Shanghai, 2019), Copies / Multiples (59 Rivoli, Paris, 2018), Tambours (Atelier Hauteville, Paris, 2017), and Jungle (Le 6b, Saint-Denis, 2017).

---

Sun Pei-Mao

Sun Pei-Mao (b. 1991) was born in Taipei, and graduated from the M.F.A. Program (Painting Group) of the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts. He spent the second half of 2016 as an exchange student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. He now lives and works in Hsinchu.

Due to the genetic condition of color weakness, Sun launched an extensive experiment on colors from 2011 to 2020. In his experiment, he explored the possibility of creating compositions from the standpoint of physics, and employed complementary colors to craft visual effects, which conveyed a sense of eeriness that evoked illusory scenes in movies. After 2020, Sun has found his creative topics from the graffiti in his notebooks, and shifted his attention from colors and canvas to pencil and paper. The change has resulted in an increased degree of intuitiveness and sensibility in his work. Stemming from a simple question in his mind that begins with “what would it be like if…,” Sun’s work is reminiscent of his unintentional self-murmur or expectations in life, based on which the artist unveils an unfettered, carefree world.

Sun was awarded the Taipei Art Awards in 2017. His recent solo exhibitions include Reveal One’s True Colors (Yiri Arts, Taipei, 2022), LLOOVVEE (Yiri Arts, Taipei, 2018), Entering the Dreamland Scarlet Curtain (Art Central, Hong Kong, 2016), and Without you & me (Yiri Arts, Taipei, 2014). He has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Set Bad (Zit-Dim Art Space, Tainan, 2021), Future Groceries (Pong Ding, Taipei, 2020), Subzoology: 2020 Taiwan Biennial (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, 2020), House of the Rising Light (Dorothy Circus Gallery, London, 2020), Array (Gallery Baton, Seoul, 2019), and The Light of the World – Contemporary Art from Taiwan (Embassy of the Republic of China (Taiwan) to the Holy See, Vatican, Rome, 2019).

---

 

Yen Yu-Ting

Yen Yu-Ting (b. 1989) was born in Taipei, and graduated from the M.F.A. Program (Ink Painting Group) of the Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts. She now lives and works in Taipei.

Yen’s work mainly engages in the disrupted psychological states resulted from information overload in this era of information explosion, together with a wide spectrum of absurdities and intriguing phenomena that comes along with such reality. Using texts, images, and stories gathered from online media as the creative background, Yen attempts recreation and re-translation by utilizing symbolism of traditional ink painting, trying to capture the mental state of absentmindedness caused by the collective restlessness in the Taiwanese society. In 2018, she conducted an art residency at the Gwangju Museum of Art in Korea, during which she started contemplating and experimenting on combining gouache and ink. Since 2020 onward, her work began slowly moving from gouache painting, which requires exact and elaborate procedures, to ink painting, which focuses on the overall atmosphere of the image. To the artist, the latter enables her to create art in a more intuitive manner and formulate her individualistic, glitch-like wrinkle rendering.

Yen’s recent solo exhibitions include House of Useless (Pong Ding, Taipei, 2021), Fragments and Remnants (Red Gold Fine Art, Taipei, 2021), and Easily Forgotten Excruciating Grief (Red Gold Fine Art, Taipei, 2017). She has participated in various group exhibitions in recent years, among which are Set Bad (Zit-Dim Art Space, Tainan, 2021), Subzoology: 2020 Taiwan Biennial (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, 2020), ASYAAF (DDP, Seoul, 2020), Beitou Local Postures Collecting Project (Hong-gah Museum, Taipei, 2020), Reciprocation: The Resonance of the Mind (Red Gold Fine Art, Taipei, 2019), Art Central (Galerie OVO, Hong Kong, 2019), and SU Wong-shen with His Young Friends (Eslite Gallery, Taipei, 2018).

Photos