Chou Shih Hsiung was born in 1989 Taipei, Taiwan. He gained his bachelor degree of art from the Central Saint Martins College of Art in London, and received the master degree of fine art from Yale University School of Art, New Haven in 2014. Chou’s sculptural work, Oil Painting, has been exhibited at Royal Academic of Art in London, and he has been acclaimed as one of the best emerging artist in U.K. Chou’s solo exhibition — “Wait Until It Dries” began touring in 2015 from London to Taipei now.

Since Chou’s art practice has taken on ideas of making art through an investigation of material processes and the formation of meaning and identity, he had begun considering the relationship between his work and the history of painterly art, but inflected through questions about how the meaning of the object or image works contextually and symbolically. More recently, he has been exploring a process of image making that plays with a complex set of internal/external spatial relations.

Having investigated the relationship between artists and art materials throughout history, Chou has tried to push the boundary of painting and practiced painting in his own ways. This Oil Painting never dry, nor does it sit on a canvas. The space within a clear perspex frame is filled by recycle engine oil. This contextually relevant material is preserved as a monumental painterly art, and represents time and space through reflective surface.

The works of Chou’s Oil Painting series seals the oil into perspex vessel. Chou described he has considered those works as specimen of this oil-made generation. Presuming the meaning and identity of his oil-made works will transit from contemporary artworks to be historical objects, since the oil are depleted in our world. There is another layer of meaning giving to the future audiences to understand the times by the artist.

I’m not trying to imitate an oil painting, I’m trying to make one. And if I disregard the assumption that painting is layers of pigments applied to a surface, then I am practicing painting by other means. — Chou Shih Hsiung

"Wait Until It Dries” is an exhibition based on the context of the material, oil. Chou has represented the relationship between oil and his family history, and investigated the further study between oil and this generation. Naming these abstract works symbolically, Chou creates the context of this exhibition from his personal background to universal. Taking on the ideas of identity, family, loneliness, Chinese traditions, paternity, big house, waiting, and eternity, this exhibition is associated with everyone’s memory.

About the exhibition

Date: 2016/06/04 - 2016/07/24

Venue: Gallery E, Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, for further information please visit www.tfam.museum.