TAN Jui Wen
Period: 2021/11/22 ~ 2022/02/20
Nation: Malaysia
Genre: painting
Born in Malacca and grew up in Muar, Malaysia. Tan Jui-Wen came to Taiwan at age 18 for studying. Majoring in Asian Gouache painting, he received M.F.A degree from Tunghai University with his thesis ‘ Mirage’, and won first place in the 1st Deutsche Bank young artist scholarship program with it.
He was invited to exhibitions in Da xiang art space, Show Gallery, AHM Gallery, Richart Gallery and Tsukuba Museum of Art in Japan. In 2020, his work and art project won Huilan Award, and was collected by Museum of Hualien County Cultural Affairs Bureau.
Tan Jui-Wen's works are mainly landscape paintings, which are composed using fragments from everyday life. While spending nearly a decade in Taiwan, he gazes at this earth of strange familiarity, picking up fragments and put them together into a complete world. On the basis of those fragments of reality, he dyes his papers with powdery pigments, over and over just like the dust that falls over time, forming unreal blurry sceneries on the paper.
Kaoshiung is one of the six major cities in Taiwan, which was known for sea salt industry during its early stage, and developed into a port city later. Through out Kaoshiung history, we can see that, ocean has brought everything that defines this city, from raw materials of sea salt industry to different colonial cultures and modern technologies. For a long time, this city has been energetic while playing an important role of logistic and heavy industries in Asia. However, industrial transformation and rise of China ports has slowly weaken its vitality. Now, the pandemic hits, everything is not moving freely like they used to and slowly settling down. While Kaoshiung is seeking its way out of these situations, as a foreigner, I am planning to look into its past, collect those images from ruins and spots which define this city from different eras, combining them with fundamental materials like sea water and sea sand from Kaoshiung port, to create a series of works that represent its memories, which also manifest its oceanic bloodline.
