Walking through it and feeling the soft, but firm pieces on one's face produces a sensation of childlike delight, where long-forbidden urges to touch spring joyfully back to life.
In the Japanese house where long panels of sliding door-windows reveal huge trees outside, the hypnotic combination of inner and outer lighted vegetation, of live and regenerated fibers, engender a welling sense of nurturing one experiences only in the most highly feminine of settings.
References to gestation, incubation, birth and flow abound. Enthralling is the Pod series that virtually hums with chrysalitic-consciousness, where strength and resilience are unseen but felt, where comfort, shielding, wrapping, protecting and eventual releasing take place. A magnificent work is a Mother-and-Child where the Mother remains attached mid-flight to her pupa babe, tremulous and still brown inside its ivory cocoon, but already gleaming mischievously in golden wire-threads.
Exhibition note:
What: Gestation and Transformation (
Artist: Chen Shu-yen (
Where: Tsung-ye Artists' Village, Tainan
When: Through July
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