Artist’s Bio
Shaoyu Chen (b. Taiwan) paints figures and objects that are wrapped, held and slowly grown, a practice rooted in domesticity and mental interiority. She holds an MFA from the Haute École d'Art et de Design (HEAD) – Genève (2022).
Chen's work is characterized by a "gestational" approach to composition, where forms appear as if developing within protective, often luminous, environments, much like the closed, candlelit room where she paints, which she imagines as a larger body with herself in its belly. She has developed a distinct painterly language that pairs an earthy, grounded palette with an ethereal, hazy atmosphere. This friction creates a "staged" reality where the mundane becomes a site of quiet, internal transformation. Having lived between Switzerland, France and Taiwan, she paints small to take the measure of a new place, then scales up as she takes root, giving her images room to stretch.
Since 2022, Chen has been a recurring collaborator with Partnership Editions and has held solo exhibitions at room.in (Taipei) and Reactor Gallery (Geneva).
Artist’s Statement
I paint figures that emerge from, dissolve into, or are held by the organic world around them: bodies becoming landscape, flesh becoming vessels. My work begins not from a concept but from an image that surfaces slowly, the way a pearl forms: layer by layer, without conscious direction, until it becomes something I can finally recognise and name. To let these images surface, I make a contained darkness for myself. I close the doors, draw the curtains and light candles, until the room becomes a larger body and I am in its belly.
My recurring preoccupations are interiority and containment: what the self carries, what it gestates, what it cannot yet release, the experience of carrying something unresolved while being both container and contained. A bird's shadow, a curling stem, a luminous face with closed eyes keep finding their way back into the work. I let these images become allegorical but keep specificity at bay, because I want to present the complexity of my subjects as it is rather than force a clean meaning onto it.
The forms I build keep figures suspended between emergence and dissolution, shaped by two repeated gestures: growing and wrapping. Each painting is made one at a time, with my full energy devoted to incubating it, and when it is ready to leave me, it often leaves for good. Having moved from Switzerland to France and back to Taiwan, I paint small to take the measure of a new place, then scale up as I take root, giving the ideas room to stretch.