Booth | A34
Artists | Yuyu YANG, JU Ming, Tzu-chi YEH, DONG Shaw-hwei, LI Chen, KOON Wai Bong
Date | 2-5 September 2026
VIP Preview
2 Sep 2026 (Wed) 11:00 - 19:00
3 Sep 2026 (Thurs) 11:00 - 15:00
Opening Hours
3 Sep 2026 (Thurs) 15:00 - 19:00
4 Sep 2026 (Fri) 11:00 - 19:00
5 Sep 2026 (Sat) 11:00 - 19:00
Asia Art Center is pleased to present a focused selection of six Taiwanese artists at Frieze Seoul 2026, bringing together works by Yuyu Yang (1926–1997), Ju Ming (1938–2023), Tzu-chi Yeh (1957–), Dong Shaw-hwei (1962–), Li Chen (1963–), and Koon Wai Bong (1974–). Spanning from the 1970s to the present, the presentation traces how artists across different generations have shaped poetic visions of the world through cultural memory, philosophy, material experimentation, and personal experience.
Rooted in new Eastern aesthetics, the presentation brings sculpture, oil painting, egg tempera, and ink into dialogue, offering a layered view of Taiwan’s artistic imagination. Rather than treating tradition as a fixed inheritance, these artists transform it into a living visual language—one that moves between East and West, body and spirit, nature and abstraction, memory and contemporary life. Together, their works articulate a distinctly Taiwanese sensibility: open to the world, yet deeply grounded in cultural reflection.
Yuyu Yang occupies a pivotal position in the development of modern sculpture in Taiwan. His work explores the relationship between form, movement, and philosophical space, translating natural forces and cultural ideals into dynamic sculptural structures. In East West Gate, the contrast between straight and curved forms reflects his negotiation between Eastern aesthetics and Western modernist thought. The work transforms spatial tension into a visual metaphor for cultural encounter, balance, and transformation.
Ju Ming’s Taichi Series stands among the most recognisable sculptural achievements in post-war Taiwanese art. Emerging from his deep engagement with bodily discipline, rhythm, and spiritual concentration, the series distils the movement of Taichi into a powerful sculptural language. Through simplified forms and decisive cuts, Ju Ming captures both the external gesture of the body and the internal flow of energy that animates it.
Li Chen extends Taiwanese sculpture into a realm of lightness, spirituality, and philosophical ambiguity. Known for giving material form to invisible states of being—breath, energy, emptiness, and impermanence—Li Chen transforms Eastern philosophical thought into a contemporary sculptural language. Ephemeral Beauty captures the fleeting splendour of cherry blossoms, holding celebration and transience in delicate tension.
In painting, Tzu-chi Yeh turns sustained observation into a form of cultural reflection. His Early Summer · Misty Mountains depicts scenes from the natural landscape of his native Hualien, a place closely associated with the artist’s sense of identity and belonging. Executed in egg tempera and oil with his renowned hyperrealist precision, the work transforms nature into an image of quiet intensity, where landscape becomes a vessel for memory, belonging, and cultural symbolism.
Dong Shaw-hwei’s still lifes are shaped by a refined sensitivity to light, atmosphere, and philosophical thought. Drawing from Impressionist approaches to colour and perception, while remaining informed by classical Chinese aesthetics and the philosophy of Zhuangzi, Dong creates images that hover between presence and stillness. Through flowers, vessels, views from the artist’s own courtyard, and subtle arrangements of everyday objects, her paintings transform ordinary subjects into meditations on time, perception, and the quiet movement of life.
Koon Wai Bong reinterprets the tradition of ink painting through innovative spatial strategies and a contemporary approach to composition. Bamboo, a long-standing subject in East Asian literati painting, becomes a site of structural reinvention and visual rhythm. Across multiple panels, Koon expands the pictorial field beyond conventional formats, allowing ink to move between image, gesture, and space.
Together, these six artists form an aesthetic terrain where nature, memory, philosophy, and cultural transformation converge. Their works do not present Taiwan’s artistic identity as a singular narrative, but as a field of continual negotiation—between tradition and modernity, material and spirit, local experience and international dialogue. Through this presentation, Asia Art Center foregrounds the depth and diversity of Taiwanese art, revealing how its artists continue to expand the possibilities of contemporary visual language.
