Drawing Fold: Chen Ching-Yuan Solo Exhibition

Three years on, TKG+ returns in late autumn with Chen Ching-Yuan’s new solo exhibition, Drawing Fold. The title not only reflects the artist’s introspective examination of his own painterly language, but also speaks to the continuously shifting nature of his practice. The word drawing emphasizes the dynamism of painting—it denotes both the material trace of oil pigment and the ongoing processes of inscription, revision, and erasure. Fold refers to creases and ruptures, but also implies notions of enclosure and gathering. In this context, the artist regards painting as an act of folding—imbuing it with the active force of enfolding. Through the opening and closing of lines, he gathers and embraces light, the body, and emotion, transforming composition into a vessel for affect and narrative. The power of unfolding, however, lies with the viewer. One may enter Chen’s work through the sensual immediacy of the image—the interplay of pale yellow, indigo, and slate blue, or the nuanced modulation of light and shadow. These formal elements alone offer a richly satisfying visual experience. But if, in the act of sustained looking, one begins to sense the emotional registers the artist seeks to convey—exaltation or solitude, resonance or silence—then the image gradually develops, revealing a palette not merely of color, but of the psyche.

Drawing Fold thus emerges as a compelling double entendre. On one level, it can be read literally—as “folded drawing”—which directly reflects a core element of Chen Ching-Yuan’s painterly language: layering. His paintings often originate from bodily experience and sensory encounters—silhouettes of time, overlapping memories, fleeting traces glimpsed from a train window—all transmuted into marks upon canvas. Chen’s sustained attention to trace manifests through stratified brushstrokes. On one hand, these are records of constant revision and overpainting; on the other, they resemble the mind’s dissolution and recomposition of scenes under shifting emotional stimuli. Moments of memory are layered again and again, eventually compressed into a single frame—details blurred, yet impressions indelible. This method forges an intimate unity between form and content, rendering the pictorial surface an embodiment of the memory mechanism itself.

The second layer of meaning in Drawing Fold is that of “the crowd beneath painting.” Chen Ching-Yuan’s work has long harbored a deep attentiveness to society and the masses. From early portraits of protestors shaped by his experience in social movements, to the Square series depicting crowds from an overhead perspective, the artist continually asks: How is the individual inevitably swept into the current of history? And how does singular identity slowly dissolve within the overwhelming narrative of the crowd?

In these works, he carries forward his early preoccupation with light and classical imagery. The paintings are suffused with an atmosphere that intertwines mystery and naturalism, where dramatic lighting is used not for nostalgic ornamentation, but to cast a probing beam onto the deeper metaphors embedded in the image. The light here is not bright and celebratory, but carries a tragic shadow, or a sorrow as diaphanous as silk. This grammar of light and shadow reflects his enduring concern with the crowd, while also touching upon the silent yet taut tension between the individual and the collective.

For Chen, framing emotional and perceptual states through scenographic sketching—drawing out sentiment through environmental cues—has become a signature of his visual language. His paintings lead the viewer to focus not on the surface of daily life, but on the emotional undercurrents that quietly course beneath it. Drawing Fold, then, is not merely a record of human conditions in their plurality; it is a mode of inscription—of memory, of sentiment, of the delicate and unspoken—that resonates with the artist’s enduring pursuit: to present a language and form that only painting can make manifest.