Born in 1963 in Taipei, Taiwan
Lives and works in New Taipei City, Taiwan
At the age of 14, Yuan Hui-Li aspired to become a painter. She was part of the first graduating class of the fine arts department at the National Institute of the Arts in Taipei. In 1992 she was awarded to be part of the group exhibition Innovational and Experimental Chinese Ink Painting at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. In 2005, she received a M.F.A. degree in Chinese ink painting from the Taipei National University of the Arts. In 2012, she received the Ink and Gouache Painting Preferred Award of the Kaohsiung Award from the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. In 2016, she received her PhD degree in art creation and theory from the Tainan National University of the Arts. She is now an adjunct assistant professor at the National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu.
Yuan considers tradition as the fountainhead of her artistic expression, but also as an object of reflection. Her practice stretches across diverse media, from varying two-dimensional mediums, to three-dimensional installation, to digital imagery, through which she attempts to rejuvenate the existing aesthetics vocabulary of form and meaning, and to offer a new perspective on what may have been neglected in the broader art-historical narrative. Her distinct body of work include: Discrete Islands and Intrinsic Potential Landscape, where she investigates the relationship between ink and object through different materials as a metaphor for the modern state of alienation; Fiery Ink, where she probes haze pollution in this pioneering discourse of form and meaning that upends the canon of traditional ink painting; Manual of Yuan’s Texturizing Strokes, where she supplants naturalism of the traditional texturizing technique with emotionalism of her own making that opens a window on the alternate realm of the classical method; THEY Shanshui, where she creates a world of hybridity and juxtaposed dissimilitude; digitally altered THEY Shanshui, where a composite of THEY Shanshui and an ancient classical masterpiece upturns the conventional context and structure of traditional ink painting; and More Is Less, where her approach to the accumulated ink method conjures temporality.
Important solo exhibitions include: Hidden Emotion in Texture, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2021); Moist and Burnt: As Ink Breathes, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2017); Plural Landscape, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2014); Maternal Landscape, Soochow University Arts Center, Taipei, Taiwan (2011); Element & Rhythm, Henglu Art Museum, Hangzhou, China (2010); Track: 1985–2008, NHCUE Art Space, National Hsinchu University of Education, Hsinchu, Taiwan (2008); Roaming and Revolving in Vacancy and Space, Guan Xiang Art Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2005); Dwell Amidst the Mountain and Inhale From the Valley, Kalos Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2000). Notable group exhibitions include: Lost Pieces of Me, Chiayi International Art Doc Film Festival, Chiayi Municipal Museum, Chiayi, Taiwan (2018); Force Field and Variations: The Cross-Culturally of Ink Painting, Yun Fei Fan Museum, Tainan, Taiwan (2017); Reading the Landscape, Stories From Artists, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan (2016); Collection and Dialogue — Taiwan’s Contemporary Ink Painting, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan (2014); Kaohsiung Award, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, Taiwan (2012); Contemporary Bland Painting — Exhibition & Symposium, Songzhuang Art Museum, Beijing, China (2011); The New Space: 2009 Exhibition of Contemporary Cross-Strait Ink Paintings, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (2009); Form, Idea, Essence, Rhythm: Contemporary East Asian Ink Painting, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (2008); Prominent Alumni Exhibition, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan (2007); Qui Ji Da Hua: Ink Painting, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan (2006); Innovational and Experimental Chinese Ink Painting, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (1992).