HER ART: Contemporary Taiwanese Female Artists

Text by: Yi-Ling Hsiao

“Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.” —Virginia Woolf once said at the dawn of the last century. Under the immense cultural inscriptions accumulated over time, the quest for the “Female as Subject” has persisted for a century. Today, “A Room of One’s Own” is reinterpreted in the unique context of 21st-century Taiwan. Without aggressive confrontation, its seemingly leisurely pace subtly penetrates, opening up layers of memories and images within what once symbolized the private—hotel rooms. In the 2021 Formosa Art Fair’s special exhibition “HER ART: Contemporary Taiwanese Female Artists,” two rooms will feature works from fifteen female artists. These artists, spanning different generations, present highly diverse creative styles and forms, from Taiwan’s landscapes and everyday objects to self-reflection. They attempt to write a narrative that “women are more than just women” in response to these anxious times brought about by the pandemic.

From ink and gouache to ceramics and three-dimensional creations, through various media and techniques, starting from “Écriture féminine” and the concept of difference, and further deconstructing gender bodies and symbols, each artist’s gaze reveals societal imprints and projections. With unique sensitivity and transgression, they powerfully depict a more open and fluid potential. In this data-driven era, inundated with numbers, calculations, and measurements, and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information from digital media, people’s senses are bombarded with a mix of important and trivial, urgent and trivial, real and fake news. The insatiable desire to see is devoured by the massive amount of information. “HER ART: Contemporary Taiwanese Female Artists” will pose questions and seek answers: as female creators facing voids, can they shed the burdens of multiple identities, escape the confines of gender frameworks, and allow their works to exist in a state of complete openness?

In Room 7007, we will see Wang Ziyun’s oil paintings focusing on interior landscapes, Wang Yiting’s narrative ceramics combining marine life and pottery fragments, Zhou Fangyu’s acrylic works depicting Taiwan’s township architecture with a playful touch, Sun Yihua’s floral and fluid lines on wooden materials using gouache and ink, Gao Yating’s paper-based color responses to art history through copying, Shao Yingli’s heartscape completed with bodily perception in the countryside of Tainan, Yang Yuning’s exploration of ink brush techniques, Tao Yujie’s finely detailed yet critically parodic mixed media paintings, and Su Xiaomeng’s metal wire weaving. In Room 7005, we will have Jiang Meifang’s aluminum anodized metalwork, Li Meng’s depictions of everyday small objects, Lin Liang’s ceramic utensils and oil paintings, Lin Jiayi’s abstract ceramic panels completed with flowing glazes, Bai Qiaoling’s calligraphy and seal carving, and Ye Yili’s three-dimensional works combining LEGO toys to explore nature.

These intricate works across various media illustrate that contemporary Taiwanese female artists are gradually shifting their focus from traditional family narratives and bodily representations to exploring their own identities and constructing personal symbols. This provides a new perspective on viewing differences in landscapes and suggests new rhetorical paths and transgressive possibilities under the binary gender opposition and patriarchal authority.

(Artist names are listed by the number of strokes in their surnames)

Curated and Executed by: SAN Gallery, Yun Chao Art