Appearances under Erasure by Juin Shieh

Shieh has unfolded the art with her very own life experience, embedded with the contemplation and dialectics on individuals, which deeply weaves her practice with intellectual enquiries and social structure of the contemporary era. Endowed with dual characteristics of drawing and painting, also feminine attentiveness, her art simultaneously is tenacious and magnanimous. Besides, the exquisite rendering transforms the bitterness, struggle, pursuit as well as sweetness of her many roles in life into images like a sonata imbued with dynamic symbols and organic patterns.

Appearances under Erasure gives the theme that the artist’s long attempt to retain the drawing within painting and the other way around during rubbing and erasing in between the charcoal and oils. The exhibition piles appearances of narratives of grass’s life cycle she observes while walking dog, the bird remains and rotten flesh dig out by ToTo, her current family dog but used to be free-ranging at campus, and the studio “Visual Bible”, a reference book entitled Color Atlas of Human Anatomy the artist bought from a New York book stand 30 years ago. In Duplicate Movement, there is a seemingly squatting or lying body, legs and feet or shoulders in overgrown weeds and vines. It is a stimulation of how Shieh’s cognition of civilization getting along with her country life. The harshness and freedom of the strokes and lines illustrate chaos meanwhile reconstruct disciplines. The process is the path of meditation. Despite that she exerts her strength to erase and wipe, deliberately to rub and polish, the ultimate direction and inevitable destination have not yet been discovered. Switching to an ordinary appearance of the artist’s studio, her mind and body as if an enduring rag that demands repeatedly cleanings with rubs, it wipes the inner thoughts, and consistently squeezes out significations in solid state and liquid connotations floating along. She retains their symbols in stages on her imagery platform. Layers of resplendence continue to expand, in resonant with the scenes of walking dog and more. She travels back and forth between symbols of civilization and wild appearance, tailor making a world for herself on the paper or canvas. As the artist concludes in the statement- “Erasure to creation and the process of interpretation is the Tai Chi Diagram of the coexistence of the mind and the physical eyes. “