CHOU YU-CHENG

Recent years have seen him begin making gradient paintings. Pivoting away from his previous methodology, the artist started experimenting with different colouring techniques based on fluid dynamics in 2020. The outbreak of the pandemic, which restricted movement and activity, left the artist with more time to focus on this painting experiment. He leverages the differences in pigments within the paints, allowing the flow of water to generate a dense gradient texture, ultimately creating distinctive sheets of coloured paper. This marks not only the inception of the 'Moody' series (2020–2022), where assiduous craftsmanship conjures meticulously cut pieces of paper on canvas to form clinical compositions, but also the beginning of his exploration into emotion.

The title 'Paper Folding,' a direct reference to his latest body of work, denotes the artist's choice of medium and the principal element that constitutes the image of his work. The precarious stacks of paper, light as a feather yet prone to collapse, gravitate toward a fleeting display of intimacy that is hard to articulate: a lack of sorrow though on the verge of coming undone, an absence of joy in the presence of vibrant colour. What the artist grapples with is less the paper itself than his emotion. The disorienting three years of the pandemic, for him, were as much a cure as they were a curse. Inevitably forced to slow down during the days of lockdown, he began a colouring experiment with a single sheet of paper, which served as the basis of his painting practice. In the seemingly loose stacking of paper and fastidious arrangement of geometric shapes, Chou Yu-Cheng meditates a minimalist aesthetics by turning his attention away from the exterior to the inner world.