Artist’s Bio​

Shaoyu Chen (b. Taiwan) is a visual artist whose practice explores the intersection of domesticity and mental interiority. She holds an MFA from the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) – Genève (2022) and a BA from National ChengChi University. 

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Chen utilizes objects and nature as anatomical metaphors for evolving emotional states. Her work is characterized by a "gestational" approach to composition, where figures and objects appear as if developing within protective, often luminous, environments. 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.

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Since 2022, Chen has been a recurring collaborator with Partnership Editions and has held solo exhibitions at room.in (Taipei) and Reactor Gallery (Geneva). Her work continues to investigate how the physical world—through the objects we inhabit—maps the invisible boundaries of the self.

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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 vessel. 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.

My recurring preoccupations are interiority and containment — what the self carries, what it gestates, what it cannot yet release. These concerns are rooted in interiority itself — the experience of carrying something unresolved, of being simultaneously container and contained.
I work in oil, building forms through sfumato-like blending that keeps figures suspended between emergence and dissolution. Nothing in the paintings fully arrives or fully disappears.