Asia Art Center (Taipei) presents Cramps, a solo exhibition by Kuo Yen Fu, from March 7 to April 26, 2026. This exhibition marks Kuo's first solo presentation at Asia Art Center and features 26 new works, spanning painting, sculpture, and installation. It is the artist's first full solo exhibition in two years.
"Cramps" refers to a real bodily condition that occurs at moments of physical threshold. For Kuo, painting is a repetitive and disciplined process, akin to athletic training. Between overexertion, brief imbalance, and recovery, the canvas becomes a site where the body confronts itself, measuring, adjusting, and recalibrating its limits. Many of the paintings in the exhibition draw on the artist's long-standing engagement with competitive sports, translating physical tension into driving brushstrokes and compositional momentum.
Meadow presents a large-scale fragment of vision experienced while galloping on horseback. The grass is no longer a passive backdrop, but a field stretched by speed and swept past by the body; forms and color blocks shift under motion, echoing moments when vision and bodily movement fall out of sync. Still Body, by contrast, transforms post-movement pause into another form of tension. When the body momentarily stops, its internal rhythms and residual reverberations persist, rendering "stillness" itself part of the athletic experience. Works centered on states of competition, such as Noise, Speed Up, Obstacles, and Bodies, further articulate sensations of speed, resistance, and physical pressure encountered in the act of running. An earlier series, Suitcase, appears here only as a subtle thread, loosely linking the artist's long-term observations of movement, burden, and temporary suspension.
The installation Medal is composed of footwear worn by the artist over many years; their toes and heels are cut and mounted across the wall, pointing to a moment when running comes to a stop, and so does any sense of glory. The sculptural work Weapon, shaped like a racket and embedded with numerous track spikes, transforms an object associated with competition and returns into a hazardous form. It suggests that competition is no longer merely the pursuit of honor, but a wager entangled with risk and consequence.
In a smaller, dimly lit space, the artist introduces a life-size horse model, shown alongside works such as Brown Tail and Saddle. It is a model imported from Europe more than three decades ago and was among the first of its kind in Taiwan. It reflects the artist's deep childhood connection to horses. During the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945), Kuo's grandfather worked as a carriage driver for officials at the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan. As a child, he often wandered through horse stables and training grounds, watching jockeys prepare saddles and harnesses and listening to the sound of horseshoes striking the ground. These sensory experiences shaped his earliest understanding of the relationship between body, speed, and perception.
In Cramps, time no longer advances linearly, but repeatedly folds back upon itself through cycles of running, stopping, and recovery. The exhibition articulates a temporal experience that is stretched and compressed, in which, as the body approaches its limits, perception slows down and is recalibrated in relation to the world.