RHIZOME
acrylic, chalk on canvas, 2024-2022
As an urban nomad, I explore the world through a metaphorical cartography of energy, tracing connections between places, living systems, and memory. Inspired by both natural processes and scientific research, my work operates between the microcosm and the macrocosm, articulating an aesthetic of movement, displacement, and interdependence.
"To enter the intense blue that CHEN Mei-Tsen offers us is to embark on an adventure, to journey through a travel diary filled with memories rich in emotion—inked, mapped, cherished, and cracked by the passage of time. We are caught in the web, in the paradox of wandering and being inscribed within a territory. We follow footprints, maps, networks, tumults, and countless winding paths that construct a primary identity. We find ourselves embracing these forms, unfolding a root-like architecture toward a breaking point that grips us to the core while opening up new horizons. For the trace is there, tenacious and rhizomatic, inviting us to enter every interstice, to travel through arteries, forests, synapses, floating worlds, smart cities as well as remote urban settlements. Countless converging inspirations carry us into the work, into its historicity: Taipei, revisited time and again…" by Marc-Williams DEBONO
acrylic, chalk on canvas, 2024-2022
As an urban nomad, I explore the world through a metaphorical cartography of energy, tracing connections between places, living systems, and memory. Inspired by both natural processes and scientific research, my work operates between the microcosm and the macrocosm, articulating an aesthetic of movement, displacement, and interdependence.
"To enter the intense blue that CHEN Mei-Tsen offers us is to embark on an adventure, to journey through a travel diary filled with memories rich in emotion—inked, mapped, cherished, and cracked by the passage of time. We are caught in the web, in the paradox of wandering and being inscribed within a territory. We follow footprints, maps, networks, tumults, and countless winding paths that construct a primary identity. We find ourselves embracing these forms, unfolding a root-like architecture toward a breaking point that grips us to the core while opening up new horizons. For the trace is there, tenacious and rhizomatic, inviting us to enter every interstice, to travel through arteries, forests, synapses, floating worlds, smart cities as well as remote urban settlements. Countless converging inspirations carry us into the work, into its historicity: Taipei, revisited time and again…" by Marc-Williams DEBONO
Solo Exhibition "Into the Blue" at Julia Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan, 2023
典藏 今藝術&投資 ARTCO Monthly & Investment
December 2023
Intercity Nomadic Cultural Identity
Chen Mei-Tsen Solo Exhibition "Into the Blue"
HUANG Hai-Ming
December 2023
Intercity Nomadic Cultural Identity
Chen Mei-Tsen Solo Exhibition "Into the Blue"
HUANG Hai-Ming
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典藏 ARTouch
December 2023
The Moving Point of Origin: "Into the Blue" and Chen Mei-Tsen's Creative Quest
TSAI Chao-Yi
典藏 今藝術&投資 ARTCO Monthly & Investment
January 2024
The Spiritual Connection of Entanglement, Separation, and Regathering
LEE Jing-Hua
January 2024
The Spiritual Connection of Entanglement, Separation, and Regathering
LEE Jing-Hua
|
|
ARTCO Monthly & Investment
December 2023
Intercity Nomadic Cultural Identity
Chen Mei-Tsen Solo Exhibition "Into the Blue"
HUANG Hai-Ming
curator and art critic
This is, above all, a fascinating lifelong nomadic journey in search of urban communities where differences coexist and diverse forms of creativity are encouraged. Or, more simply, it is a fascinating journey of an artist continually searching for different homes—both as an artist and in life.
The Artistic Development of Chen Mei-Tsen
Chen Mei-Tsen was born in 1966 and moved to Paris in 1990 to pursue further studies. She obtained artist residency status and has lived and worked in France for more than three decades. Chen Mei-Tsen has said:
“Understanding Taiwan’s multiple colonial histories, I came to realize that in major cities, especially port cities, architectural styles often reveal the coexistence of different eras and cultures. In order to expand the geographical limits of an islander’s understanding, I set out to travel and discover the cultures of other countries… The search for a sense of identity requires the gradual accumulation and sedimentation of knowledge gained through travel, culture, local customs, and ways of life. Wandering through cities across Europe and America, moving from one street to another, I walked along countless roads that gradually became intertwined and formed my own network map. Like the rhizomes of plants spreading in all directions in search of nourishment, these journeys also became a journey of inner awakening.”
Yet, the statement still leaves much unsaid. At the very least, it should be understood on two different levels. First, Taiwan is an island nation, and gaining an in-depth understanding of the cultures of other countries can be difficult. Approaching them through specific cities is perhaps the most practical way. Different major cities around the world each possess their own distinctive cultural characteristics. Only through extended travel and immersion can we deepen our understanding of the different cultural treasures hidden within these cities, and select and combine those with which we wish to identify.
The second point may be even more important. Throughout their historical development, many major cities have absorbed and integrated very different cultures. It is precisely through the continuous nourishment provided by these external cultural sources that existing cultures are able to grow and develop. Yet such processes can only truly be understood by becoming deeply involved in them and by forming relationships with many different people. Taiwan itself has received nourishment from many external cultures. Yet it often overlooks or fails to appreciate the interesting acts of re-creation that emerge from these encounters. How can the original culture and foreign cultures be brought into a more nuanced, deeper, and even more creative relationship? Perhaps encounters with other cultures can also remind us to rediscover the precious treasures hidden within ourselves, to value them again, and to allow them to begin shining with a renewed brilliance.
Chen Mei-Tsen’s Into the Blue at Julia Gallery conveys the profound and powerful sense of cultural identity that an international urban nomad develops in relation to the different cities in which she has lived. The Into the Blue series seeks to convey how each experience of identification can become so profound and powerful that a new city is transformed into the nomad’s most intimate home. Yet even the most intimate home must eventually be left behind, as the nomad moves on toward a broader and unknown world. The word “identity” has been deliberately added to the title in order to emphasize that, during the period she lives in a particular place, the artist also assumes a certain active role and participates in it. In her new Rhizome series, through the complex relationships among people and other forms of life within the city and its surrounding natural environment, she conveys a state of autonomy, diversity, and coexistence with which she most strongly identifies. Perhaps this is precisely what is necessary for an unfamiliar city to become an intimate home.
Into the Blue: Memories in Ultramarine
Chen Mei-Tsen’s Into the Blue series resembles a topographical map of land and sea. On maps of coastal towns, the ocean is usually represented in ultramarine, with variations in tone according to the terrain and depth. Yet in these works, she uses the same ultramarine across the land as well. More intriguingly, the seabed does not appear to represent a natural underwater landscape, but rather resembles the ruins of an ancient city submerged beneath the sea. Her maps of maritime cities are placed upon this imagined underwater landscape. Alongside the memory of the architectural blueprints of her father, an architect, these works also carry another, deeper spiritual and emotional meaning.
At the ports, harbors, and points where the geometric city maps, with their strong contrast between white and ultramarine, meet the sea, one often finds small or large clusters of free-flowing lines moving lightly outward. At times, they seem to become another layer of underwater contour lines. Here, ancient time and present time, ancient architectural ruins and highly concise and precise architectural drawings, coexist subtly within the spiritual vessel of ultramarine. Traces of thought that transcend time, the slow processes of nature, the accumulation and transformation of geological strata in the Anthropocene, and the comparatively rapid movements of living organisms or ships all come together to form an extremely complex mental map, in which the history, geography, time and space of maritime cities, their social transformations, and human interactions are all interconnected.
Small or large clusters of free-flowing lines move lightly outward from the city, making the map forever incomplete. The artist then places these fragments—nomadic or expanding maps originating from the city as their core—within larger and more indistinct maps that include both land and sea, as if attempting to connect them together. I also notice that thelines gradually become more numerous, intersecting and intertwining with one another, as though they were slowly becoming a temporary settlement or network based primarily on relationships rather than on architectural structures. This seemingly inconspicuous phenomenon appears to foreshadow the highly complex interwoven lines that emerge in the subsequent Rhizome series.
I believe that the ultramarine blue connecting the physical architecture of the maritime city and the sea has a particularly significant meaning in this series. Ultramarine is a peculiar color: its luminosity is very low, yet its saturation is extremely high. It lies between transparency and opacity, between materiality and immateriality. It is therefore a medium capable of immersing and protecting the human being within it, while at the same time isolating the person within a boundless, immaterial, spiritual, and mysterious space.
Throughout history, ultramarine has often been used for sacred images and religious icons. It is a spiritual, even divine, medium. At the same time, it also possesses the power to engulf and isolate us within the boundless blackness of an unknowable darkness and void, charged with energy. I believe that this blue can also be connected to love that is unforgettable and deeply marked by the pain of separation.
It may be useful to compare these works with another of the artist’s series, in which complete maps of cities and their outskirts almost entirely merge with tree trunks of almost human form in primeval forests, together with complex vines. Looking back at these blue maps of port cities—maps that exclude the forces of untamed nature and are filled with rational energy—opens up many possibilities for reflection. The lines that move rapidly outward from the city possess, to some extent, the gesture of escaping from the city, while at the same time embodying the courage to venture into unknown territories.
Rhizome: The Organic Quality of Grey
In the new Rhizome series, the intense ultramarine surfaces disappear. At the bottom of the somewhat turbid space, deep grey emerges, resembling the blurred outline of a dark surface on the ground seen from high above through layers of cloud. Of course, it also resembles the indistinct outline of an ancient city submerged beneath the sea, seen through semi-transparent water. The medium filling the spaces in these works is clearly different. In the previous series, the spatial medium was much clearer, or perhaps was entirely a spiritual medium. Here, by contrast, it contains a greater sense of materiality and organicity.
The lines drawn by drifting organisms interact and resonate more strongly with the real environment or medium around them, colliding and connecting with it. As they move, they also leave traces of mucus and the diffusion of chemical substances. In this way, the works provide a simulated ecosystem in which the behavior of organisms and the movement of energy within multiple layers of space become visible and can be observed.
Some energy lines frequently collide with one another, generating splashes before returning to calm. Others, individually or unintentionally, converge into stronger bundles of energy, changing direction through their collective force. Yet beneath all this, the outlines of cities on the seabed or on the ground can still be faintly perceived. Are these complex relationships among microorganisms, or between individuals and groups within the real societies in which we live?
One circular work is particularly striking. Countless energy lines move inward from the enclosed circle toward the center. Along the way, some individual lines gather into small bundles, then into larger and stronger bundles of energy, and eventually even adhere to
one another and become solid masses. Does this resemble the collective gathering and warming of a group within a city, like the urban festivals that take place everywhere? Or does it suggest intense confrontation between different groups, like wars, struggles, protests, or riots within a city?
There are two nearly square and very similar works that seem to be particularly favored by the artist. The density of the lines in motion is clearly reduced. There are many irregular intersections, but few instances in which the lines connect into bundles moving in the same direction, and none form solid masses. Activity is relatively sparse in the central area. There is movement from the outside toward the center as well as from the center outward. More often, however, there are irregular curved movements, mostly consisting of independent, slow-moving lines that continually change direction. What is different is that some individual lines become more prominent and display greater variation. They almost become a unique performance of life, creating nearby a small square where one can observe and experience them at close range.
I believe that, through these various forms, the artist illustrates the complex relationships among the many independent individuals within a city, or the organic relationships between individuals and the larger environment, and even their relationships with the history of the city. In conversations with the artist, I learned that she actually wishes to emphasize the importance of water within various ecosystems. We can also understand these works as depicting a state in which various planktonic organisms in a pond coexist
peacefully, live together, and continuously transform.
Into the Blue: Entangled Nomadism
Between one departure and another, and between each new beginning, something gradually takes shape, is drawn together, and is summoned into being: a rich, inspiring, and almost unimaginable world. I believe this is related to the artist’s use of a semi-abstract approach, her juxtaposition of microscopic and macroscopic perspectives, and her uncertain narrative structure. In my analysis and interpretation here, I have emphasized the coexistence of multiple entrances and multiple cultures within the city. In a sense, this is also a form of nomadism: a kind of entangled nomadism taking place among different cities across countries, among different areas within multicultural cities, and among the different combinations of forms and contents within the exhibition. If readers recall the real multicultural cities in which they have once lived, particularly the diverse cities of Taiwan where they themselves have lived, they may be better able to appreciate the seemingly effortless yet profound expression presented in Chen Mei-Tsen’s solo exhibition Into the Blue.
ARTouch
December 2023
The Moving Point of Origin: "Into the Blue" and Chen Mei-Tsen's Creative Quest
TSAI Chao-Yi
curator
As the theme of an artistic presentation, Into the Blue implicitly reveals many of the thoughts and creative codes embedded in Chen Mei-Tsen’s work—those relating to the artist’s life experiences, her contemplation and imagination of the journey of life, and, most importantly, the source of inspiration and direction that guide her artistic practice.
First and foremost, an artist is a traveler. Departing from “home,” she discovers the world through movement and embarks upon a journey of exploration through life. Secondly, the “near” in contrast to the “far” suggests that, beyond the actual physical experience of leaving and returning to one’s place of origin, the artist necessarily undergoes a complex process of emotional reflection and reconstruction in relation to the idea of “home.” Although Taiwan holds a fundamental importance in her life, psychologically she has never truly returned to the original “home” from which her journey began. Instead, she inhabits a position that seems within reach yet is simultaneously near and far. From this position, she reflects upon the definition of “home” and embarks upon an ongoing search for and dialectical exploration of the self. Furthermore, her travels and movements across geographical and national boundaries have clearly shaped Chen Mei-Tsen’s inner thinking as a traveler. The contradictions, impacts, observations, encounters, and processes of readjustment arising from her encounters with others and unfamiliar environments have compelled her to continuously and dynamically pursue the question: “What is home?” At this stage, she has chosen “blue” as a vehicle through which to release emotion, find a sense of inner repose, and allow her own subjectivity to emerge.
Seeking Blue: Self-Exploration and Reconstruction
Blue is a color imbued with poetry, mystery, and a sense of inclusiveness, and it has occupied a unique position throughout the history of art, across cultures and periods. The important twentieth-century French artist Yves Klein (1928–1962) was particularly devoted to ultramarine blue, believing that it most fully expressed an awareness of existence and evoked the strongest spiritual resonance. He once stated: “Blue is the sky, water, air, depth and infinity, freedom and life. Blue is the most essential color of the universe.” Chen Mei-Tsen’s spiritual perception of blue clearly resonates strongly with Klein’s. Yet, in her work, “blue” tends more toward a language of self-exploration and reconstruction. Her blue possesses directionality, temporality, and a sense of space, and is deeply connected to the movement of the mind and spirit.
Chen Mei-Tsen first discovered the mystery, depth, and boundless capacity of blue during a journey abroad, when she looked down from an airplane and received a powerful visual revelation. At that moment, cities, mountains, land, lakes, forests, and oceans seemed to dissolve into one another, becoming layers of blue that merged with the sky to form an immense and boundless field of blue. Her second powerful encounter with blue emerged from a long-forgotten memory. Her father, an architect, died when she was young. One day, among the family belongings carefully preserved by her mother, she discovered her father’s architectural drawings. Through the renewed appearance of these blueprints, and through the distinctive scent inherent in their materiality, memories of the time she had spent with her father in her youth resurfaced—memories that had been severed from her and buried deep within her since her father’s departure. Ultimately, “blue” became one of the important vocabularies of her artistic practice, rooted in Chen Mei-Tsen’s condition as a traveler. For the purposes of her artistic creation and exhibitions, she has traveled to many cities around the world. The gradual extension of her journeys has not only shaped an inner journey of awakening, but has also become interwoven with a unique life blueprint that unfolds through her pursuit of artistic creation.
For Chen Mei-Tsen, travel is a way of discovering the world and opening new horizons for her artistic practice. This self-chosen journey of movement has continued from the moment she first set out to the present day. She has traveled through numerous countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, visiting cities such as Amsterdam, Lisbon, Boston, Montreal, Vancouver, Miami, and many others. Movement across geographical boundaries has enabled her to see more widely, farther, and more deeply. From the search for the self undertaken through travel to the challenge of transcending the self in confronting the complexities of reality, she has been compelled not only to face the many uncertaintiesand confusions of life, but also to continually reposition her relationship with herself and with the world. As a result, her various painting series are like intimate and subtle writings of her personal life history, containing abundant reflections on life and traces of experiences permeated by her ways of seeing.
The Artistic Quest for Home
Has movement across geographical boundaries diminished the importance of “home” for her? Chen Mei-Tsen’s answer is clearly no. She has always known where she comes from, where she wishes to pause, and where she hopes to go. Throughout her artistic journey, she has never forgotten the memories of her family home, so closely connected with her father’s blueprints, nor the profound visual impact of that boundless blue and its expansive capacity for inclusion. If “home” is understood as a spiritual object of identification through a sense of belonging, then Chen Mei-Tsen’s “home” is not a physical geographical space, but the creative heart in which she can find repose. In other words, the creative heart is her point of origin; it is where the “home” of the traveling self resides. From this point, and following wherever her heart leads her, her artistic journey unfolds as a process of constructing the poetic language of her work.
The two series presented by Chen Mei-Tsen on this occasion, INTO THE BLUE and RHIZOME, both contain powerful imagery of wandering and spreading. The blue that permeates the entire pictorial field creates spatial dimensions through subtle variations of tone while also giving form to traces of the passage of time. The dynamic lines within the works seem to generate their own tendrils, expanding freely, unconstrained by boundaries and unrestricted by the spatial limits of the pictorial field. Both series intuitively and
sensuously reveal the artist’s dynamic thinking on her artistic quest and life journey. They encompass her return to and contemplation of personal memories, her observations of the world and the ecology of the earth, and the tracing and reconstruction of her own life trajectory. The two series differ, however, in their modes of pictorial expression, each unfolding from a distinct perspective on her state of mind.
The INTO THE BLUE series directly presents the significance and particular importance of travel in Chen Mei-Tsen’s life, and carries a strong autobiographical quality. The series not only records the artist’s movements between different cities, but also embodies a process through which she recontextualizes her memories of travel, re-examines them, and weaves them anew into the narrative of her artistic practice. The works remove all extraneous elements and those deemed unnecessary, retaining only fragments of routes within concise and distilled map-like imagery, through which the artist searches for and recreates her memories and imaginings of each place. Taking her original creative impulse as her point of departure, the artist has never ceased her steps of exploration. Different cities and different places become indispensable elements within the blueprint of her life, collectively laying out connections from the past to the present and into the future. As she continues to travel through life without imposing limitations upon herself, these connections are able to freely and continuously overflow, extend, and expand.
In contrast to the calm, rational, and adaptable character of the INTO THE BLUE series, the RHIZOME series conveys a much stronger force of emotional expression. The dense and vibrant lines in the works spread downward from the surface and proliferate in all directions, advancing toward the unknown world of infinite depth and interweaving into richly varied chapters of life. Chen Mei-Tsen has spoken of the RHIZOME series as an observation of the ecological cycles and processes of life on the earth, while her own creative path resembles the rhizomes of plants, which must extend in all directions in search of nourishment. From the perspective of painting, the dynamic forms associated with an awareness of life in this series not only reproduce the vitality of nature, but also greatly amplify those emotional aspects of the perceptual world that are easily overlooked, blurred, or suppressed. They subtly reveal the artist’s state of being throughout her artistic quest—an existence containing both a courageous determination to move forward and the setbacks, uncertainty, longing, joy, and radiance concealed within the process of exploration.
The INTO THE BLUE and RHIZOME series reflect the artist’s personal life history and state of being, rich in self-reflection and contemplation, while each also possesses an awareness of topological expansion and its underlying connections. Presented together, the two series question and respond to one another, while complementing and extending each other. The condition of the traveler is one of continually moving and searching, and of transforming and renewing oneself through that search. Chen Mei-Tsen’s journey through life and art may have included hesitation and moments of return, but she has rarely lost her direction or abandoned her purpose. Taking the creative heart that seeks self-realization as the unchanging point of origin within movement, she opens ever farther, broader, and deeper multidimensional possibilities for her artistic quest.
December 2023
The Moving Point of Origin: "Into the Blue" and Chen Mei-Tsen's Creative Quest
TSAI Chao-Yi
curator
As the theme of an artistic presentation, Into the Blue implicitly reveals many of the thoughts and creative codes embedded in Chen Mei-Tsen’s work—those relating to the artist’s life experiences, her contemplation and imagination of the journey of life, and, most importantly, the source of inspiration and direction that guide her artistic practice.
First and foremost, an artist is a traveler. Departing from “home,” she discovers the world through movement and embarks upon a journey of exploration through life. Secondly, the “near” in contrast to the “far” suggests that, beyond the actual physical experience of leaving and returning to one’s place of origin, the artist necessarily undergoes a complex process of emotional reflection and reconstruction in relation to the idea of “home.” Although Taiwan holds a fundamental importance in her life, psychologically she has never truly returned to the original “home” from which her journey began. Instead, she inhabits a position that seems within reach yet is simultaneously near and far. From this position, she reflects upon the definition of “home” and embarks upon an ongoing search for and dialectical exploration of the self. Furthermore, her travels and movements across geographical and national boundaries have clearly shaped Chen Mei-Tsen’s inner thinking as a traveler. The contradictions, impacts, observations, encounters, and processes of readjustment arising from her encounters with others and unfamiliar environments have compelled her to continuously and dynamically pursue the question: “What is home?” At this stage, she has chosen “blue” as a vehicle through which to release emotion, find a sense of inner repose, and allow her own subjectivity to emerge.
Seeking Blue: Self-Exploration and Reconstruction
Blue is a color imbued with poetry, mystery, and a sense of inclusiveness, and it has occupied a unique position throughout the history of art, across cultures and periods. The important twentieth-century French artist Yves Klein (1928–1962) was particularly devoted to ultramarine blue, believing that it most fully expressed an awareness of existence and evoked the strongest spiritual resonance. He once stated: “Blue is the sky, water, air, depth and infinity, freedom and life. Blue is the most essential color of the universe.” Chen Mei-Tsen’s spiritual perception of blue clearly resonates strongly with Klein’s. Yet, in her work, “blue” tends more toward a language of self-exploration and reconstruction. Her blue possesses directionality, temporality, and a sense of space, and is deeply connected to the movement of the mind and spirit.
Chen Mei-Tsen first discovered the mystery, depth, and boundless capacity of blue during a journey abroad, when she looked down from an airplane and received a powerful visual revelation. At that moment, cities, mountains, land, lakes, forests, and oceans seemed to dissolve into one another, becoming layers of blue that merged with the sky to form an immense and boundless field of blue. Her second powerful encounter with blue emerged from a long-forgotten memory. Her father, an architect, died when she was young. One day, among the family belongings carefully preserved by her mother, she discovered her father’s architectural drawings. Through the renewed appearance of these blueprints, and through the distinctive scent inherent in their materiality, memories of the time she had spent with her father in her youth resurfaced—memories that had been severed from her and buried deep within her since her father’s departure. Ultimately, “blue” became one of the important vocabularies of her artistic practice, rooted in Chen Mei-Tsen’s condition as a traveler. For the purposes of her artistic creation and exhibitions, she has traveled to many cities around the world. The gradual extension of her journeys has not only shaped an inner journey of awakening, but has also become interwoven with a unique life blueprint that unfolds through her pursuit of artistic creation.
For Chen Mei-Tsen, travel is a way of discovering the world and opening new horizons for her artistic practice. This self-chosen journey of movement has continued from the moment she first set out to the present day. She has traveled through numerous countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, visiting cities such as Amsterdam, Lisbon, Boston, Montreal, Vancouver, Miami, and many others. Movement across geographical boundaries has enabled her to see more widely, farther, and more deeply. From the search for the self undertaken through travel to the challenge of transcending the self in confronting the complexities of reality, she has been compelled not only to face the many uncertaintiesand confusions of life, but also to continually reposition her relationship with herself and with the world. As a result, her various painting series are like intimate and subtle writings of her personal life history, containing abundant reflections on life and traces of experiences permeated by her ways of seeing.
The Artistic Quest for Home
Has movement across geographical boundaries diminished the importance of “home” for her? Chen Mei-Tsen’s answer is clearly no. She has always known where she comes from, where she wishes to pause, and where she hopes to go. Throughout her artistic journey, she has never forgotten the memories of her family home, so closely connected with her father’s blueprints, nor the profound visual impact of that boundless blue and its expansive capacity for inclusion. If “home” is understood as a spiritual object of identification through a sense of belonging, then Chen Mei-Tsen’s “home” is not a physical geographical space, but the creative heart in which she can find repose. In other words, the creative heart is her point of origin; it is where the “home” of the traveling self resides. From this point, and following wherever her heart leads her, her artistic journey unfolds as a process of constructing the poetic language of her work.
The two series presented by Chen Mei-Tsen on this occasion, INTO THE BLUE and RHIZOME, both contain powerful imagery of wandering and spreading. The blue that permeates the entire pictorial field creates spatial dimensions through subtle variations of tone while also giving form to traces of the passage of time. The dynamic lines within the works seem to generate their own tendrils, expanding freely, unconstrained by boundaries and unrestricted by the spatial limits of the pictorial field. Both series intuitively and
sensuously reveal the artist’s dynamic thinking on her artistic quest and life journey. They encompass her return to and contemplation of personal memories, her observations of the world and the ecology of the earth, and the tracing and reconstruction of her own life trajectory. The two series differ, however, in their modes of pictorial expression, each unfolding from a distinct perspective on her state of mind.
The INTO THE BLUE series directly presents the significance and particular importance of travel in Chen Mei-Tsen’s life, and carries a strong autobiographical quality. The series not only records the artist’s movements between different cities, but also embodies a process through which she recontextualizes her memories of travel, re-examines them, and weaves them anew into the narrative of her artistic practice. The works remove all extraneous elements and those deemed unnecessary, retaining only fragments of routes within concise and distilled map-like imagery, through which the artist searches for and recreates her memories and imaginings of each place. Taking her original creative impulse as her point of departure, the artist has never ceased her steps of exploration. Different cities and different places become indispensable elements within the blueprint of her life, collectively laying out connections from the past to the present and into the future. As she continues to travel through life without imposing limitations upon herself, these connections are able to freely and continuously overflow, extend, and expand.
In contrast to the calm, rational, and adaptable character of the INTO THE BLUE series, the RHIZOME series conveys a much stronger force of emotional expression. The dense and vibrant lines in the works spread downward from the surface and proliferate in all directions, advancing toward the unknown world of infinite depth and interweaving into richly varied chapters of life. Chen Mei-Tsen has spoken of the RHIZOME series as an observation of the ecological cycles and processes of life on the earth, while her own creative path resembles the rhizomes of plants, which must extend in all directions in search of nourishment. From the perspective of painting, the dynamic forms associated with an awareness of life in this series not only reproduce the vitality of nature, but also greatly amplify those emotional aspects of the perceptual world that are easily overlooked, blurred, or suppressed. They subtly reveal the artist’s state of being throughout her artistic quest—an existence containing both a courageous determination to move forward and the setbacks, uncertainty, longing, joy, and radiance concealed within the process of exploration.
The INTO THE BLUE and RHIZOME series reflect the artist’s personal life history and state of being, rich in self-reflection and contemplation, while each also possesses an awareness of topological expansion and its underlying connections. Presented together, the two series question and respond to one another, while complementing and extending each other. The condition of the traveler is one of continually moving and searching, and of transforming and renewing oneself through that search. Chen Mei-Tsen’s journey through life and art may have included hesitation and moments of return, but she has rarely lost her direction or abandoned her purpose. Taking the creative heart that seeks self-realization as the unchanging point of origin within movement, she opens ever farther, broader, and deeper multidimensional possibilities for her artistic quest.
ARTCO Monthly & Investment
January 2024
The Spiritual Connection of Entanglement, Separation, and Regathering
LEE Jing-Hua
In December 2023, Julia Gallery presented Into the Blue: Chen Mei-Tsen Solo Exhibition. The exhibition brought together two series of works: Into the Blue, centered on ultramarine blue and exploring urban maps and networks of connection; and Rhizome, a more abstract and fluid body of work characterized by the extensive use of chalk and layered textures. Born and raised in Taiwan before moving to Paris for further studies, Chen Mei-Tsen has lived and worked in France for more than thirty years. Throughout her practice, she has been concerned with the relationships generated between cities, seeking to construct a network map from the perspective of a nomadic traveler.
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors were greeted by a video projection of a journey through a vast blue sky filled with drifting white clouds. Beside it appeared the words, “On the Way Home,” immediately introducing the exhibition’s central theme: Into the Blue. Although the notion of “home” lies at the heart of the exhibition, Chen’s sense of home has, over the years, become very different from the home preserved in her memory. Here, home is clearly not merely a physical or geographical place, but also an emotional connection to returning home and the experience of living abroad. Equally significant is the recurring presence of blue throughout the exhibition. Thiscolor recalls the blueprint drawings used by the artist’s architect father, while also symbolizing the connections between cities forged through her travels across different countries.
In the Into the Blue series, Chen Mei-Tsen depicts the distinctive street grids of cities she has visited or inhabited, including Amsterdam (AMS), Cambridge (CBG), Lisbon (LIS), and Vancouver (YVR). Extending outward from these mapped urban structures are irregular white lines—sometimes solitary, sometimes bundled together—that twist, disperse, intertwine, and reconnect. They evoke maritime routes linking port cities, as well as the traces left by travelers along their journeys. A dominant feature of the series is its extensive use of ultramarine blue, a color of low luminosity yet intense saturation, traditionally associated with religious iconography and regarded as a color of strong spiritual significance. A closer look reveals layers of overlapping blues enriched by fluid brushwork, beneath which emerge fragments of other urban networks and textures, resembling submerged cities resting beneath the sea. For Chen, these cities are interconnected like the root systems of plants, continuously extending their tendrils in search of nourishment. Likewise, human experience is shaped by encounters with different environments, just as these wandering lines explore the map, meet, separate, and converge again.
The Rhizome series, by contrast, reflects both microscopic and macroscopic perspectives. Departing from the more structured approach of Into the Blue, Chen builds these works through successive layers of ultramarine applied over black or white grounds, before veiling them with a final layer of chalk. The lines are no longer precise or rational; instead, they accumulate, intertwine, dissolve, and are accompanied by traces of splashing, spraying, erasure, and automatic gestures. They resemble waves colliding and dispersing before returning to calm, or cloud formations viewed from above as they gather and drift apart. Beyond these expansive, aerial visions, Chen also invites a microscopic reading of the works. The lines may be seen as neural pathways spreading through the brain, connecting the mind, thoughts, and emotions. They can equally be understood as routes of movement—paths traversed through space, leaving behind visible traces of passage.
Chen Mei-Tsen often describes herself as an “urban nomad.” Moving from one city to another, she absorbs the stimuli and influences of each place, transforming these lived experiences into creative energy. Because of her position as a traveler, she is able to maintain a relationship with cities that is at once intimate and distant. This position of observing from the outside enables her to perceive the subtle networks of connection that bind places together. Into the Blue presents the emotional resonances generated through Chen’s journeys across the world. At the same time, the long, unfolding lines that traverse her paintings reach back toward her homeland, forging new connections with viewers and extending outward into wider spaces.
January 2024
The Spiritual Connection of Entanglement, Separation, and Regathering
LEE Jing-Hua
In December 2023, Julia Gallery presented Into the Blue: Chen Mei-Tsen Solo Exhibition. The exhibition brought together two series of works: Into the Blue, centered on ultramarine blue and exploring urban maps and networks of connection; and Rhizome, a more abstract and fluid body of work characterized by the extensive use of chalk and layered textures. Born and raised in Taiwan before moving to Paris for further studies, Chen Mei-Tsen has lived and worked in France for more than thirty years. Throughout her practice, she has been concerned with the relationships generated between cities, seeking to construct a network map from the perspective of a nomadic traveler.
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors were greeted by a video projection of a journey through a vast blue sky filled with drifting white clouds. Beside it appeared the words, “On the Way Home,” immediately introducing the exhibition’s central theme: Into the Blue. Although the notion of “home” lies at the heart of the exhibition, Chen’s sense of home has, over the years, become very different from the home preserved in her memory. Here, home is clearly not merely a physical or geographical place, but also an emotional connection to returning home and the experience of living abroad. Equally significant is the recurring presence of blue throughout the exhibition. Thiscolor recalls the blueprint drawings used by the artist’s architect father, while also symbolizing the connections between cities forged through her travels across different countries.
In the Into the Blue series, Chen Mei-Tsen depicts the distinctive street grids of cities she has visited or inhabited, including Amsterdam (AMS), Cambridge (CBG), Lisbon (LIS), and Vancouver (YVR). Extending outward from these mapped urban structures are irregular white lines—sometimes solitary, sometimes bundled together—that twist, disperse, intertwine, and reconnect. They evoke maritime routes linking port cities, as well as the traces left by travelers along their journeys. A dominant feature of the series is its extensive use of ultramarine blue, a color of low luminosity yet intense saturation, traditionally associated with religious iconography and regarded as a color of strong spiritual significance. A closer look reveals layers of overlapping blues enriched by fluid brushwork, beneath which emerge fragments of other urban networks and textures, resembling submerged cities resting beneath the sea. For Chen, these cities are interconnected like the root systems of plants, continuously extending their tendrils in search of nourishment. Likewise, human experience is shaped by encounters with different environments, just as these wandering lines explore the map, meet, separate, and converge again.
The Rhizome series, by contrast, reflects both microscopic and macroscopic perspectives. Departing from the more structured approach of Into the Blue, Chen builds these works through successive layers of ultramarine applied over black or white grounds, before veiling them with a final layer of chalk. The lines are no longer precise or rational; instead, they accumulate, intertwine, dissolve, and are accompanied by traces of splashing, spraying, erasure, and automatic gestures. They resemble waves colliding and dispersing before returning to calm, or cloud formations viewed from above as they gather and drift apart. Beyond these expansive, aerial visions, Chen also invites a microscopic reading of the works. The lines may be seen as neural pathways spreading through the brain, connecting the mind, thoughts, and emotions. They can equally be understood as routes of movement—paths traversed through space, leaving behind visible traces of passage.
Chen Mei-Tsen often describes herself as an “urban nomad.” Moving from one city to another, she absorbs the stimuli and influences of each place, transforming these lived experiences into creative energy. Because of her position as a traveler, she is able to maintain a relationship with cities that is at once intimate and distant. This position of observing from the outside enables her to perceive the subtle networks of connection that bind places together. Into the Blue presents the emotional resonances generated through Chen’s journeys across the world. At the same time, the long, unfolding lines that traverse her paintings reach back toward her homeland, forging new connections with viewers and extending outward into wider spaces.