Yen-Yu TSENG
Es una artista taiwanesa licenciada en Bellas Artes. Utiliza prendas viejas y tejidos de desecho mediante la observación y la experimentación, para envolver obras como su propia técnica textil de deconstrucción y reensamblaje. Se trata de una forma única de esculpir tejidos, especialmente tras la tendencia a la industrialización y la globalización. Expresa objetos e historias para reflejar quién es y qué la rodea, como la interrelación entre la sociedad humana y el entorno natural.
City Doll: Bilbao Series
After receiving the MFA degree, she researchs and develops a personal "Wrapping" technique to work in a representational style of soft sculpture as fabric figure dolls. Particularly about her innovation in textile art and puppetry together. Her practice expands from flat textile by various handmade tools and textile equipments, to 3D sculpture and space installation by only hands and threads; even traveling anywhere without any limits.
Yen Yu's practice explores the development of personal traveling experience and cultural lifestyle. Specifically how the private narratives are deeply rooted in culture, environment and time. The work is interwoven the dolls into various storytelling of puppets with by small sculpture. "It features who I am and what surrounds me, also where I met someone".
Because different cultures inspire my creation and leads me to a global textile art journey, I develop a series of long-term project "City Doll" at various artist residency programs. This idea connects local history and its contemporary society with my memory together. The narrative is from people I met by independent chapters of various journeys. I wrap one doll as one story from local people.
My dolls are performed the memory of lifestyles from local people, who is may nobody now but plays an integral role in the function of our society. Such as essential participants in any domestic industries. I wrap their old clothes as fabric puppets, together intersecting their themes of history and story with personal narratives.
During my residency time, I plan to wrap some Basque fabric figure dolls with my personal memory and experience together by local old clothes and waste textiles, as the work of a kind of special site-specific souvenir. Particularly Bilbao is a capital city at the Greater Basque region, and its public transportation is convenient to other town, such as Basque Biodesign Center in Guenes.
The Interaction of Cultures 5-6
There was the rich culture and long history in one area, and may
possibly spread and mix others by religions and wars. This is almost
from the male perspective, because the limit of freedom for women at
past time. So I imagine females from the East and the West can meet
together without any limits. What may they talk about and would
something happen, or the world could change something?
What I interest in paintings is that offers history and imagination
together. There is the world of elegant ladies or an independent
woman, especially with classic dresses and luxury houses of
aristocratic female. Especially they could have the education and may
understand new things from other countries. I try to combine some
lines and frames with different paintings, which connects female
people similarly live in the same space but with different culture.
Also, it is a respect to my admired artists: China-of-Ming-dynasty
Gongbi-ink painter Qiu Ying, Dutch-born Britain-Victorian-era academic
painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Taiwan-under-Japanese-rule Hsinchu-born
Nihonga-glue painter Chen Chin, African-American postmodern mixed
media artist Emma Amos, Spanish-Civil-War Basque Bilbao-born concrete
realism painter Jose Arrue. The series of project also hints a
progress of the gradual freedom for women.
It is also a similar condition for an Asian female artist as me to
travel alone, and have artist-in-residency program at an unfamiliar
area. This time, I went to Bilbao in Spain, where is people would like
to speaking in Basque, Spanish and French than English, because of
history and geography. I tried to understand the spirit of their
culture, and use recycled Spanish merino wool, hand-twisted Basque
Latxa wool, my hair fiber, and natural-dyed wool of Malabrigo brand
from Uruguay to cross weaving with my design patterns together for
this imaginative female world with my Basque experience.
A sample file of photography to pixel design for digital loom of jacquard weaving
