Born in Taiwan in 1971, Yi-Chen HUNG passed away suddenly, likely due to overwork, in 2011. A large-scale solo exhibition curated by Chia Chi Jason WANG was staged at ESLITE GALLERY in 2012. Transgress and Reclaim presented her works accumulated over the 17 years from her studies in the UK to her return to Taiwan, in an attempt to encapsulate and decompose her artistic vision.

HUNG received her BA, MA, then PhD in Fine Art from 1991 to 2002 in London. In 2004, she returned to Taiwan and held teaching positions at Shih Chien University and Tainan National University of the Arts while devoting herself to her personal artistic pursuits. In 2007, HUNG held her first solo exhibition in Taiwan at IT PARK and immediately attracted the attention of the art community. She held five solo exhibitions from then to 2010, including Subject．Painting．Object at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, fully showcasing her abundant passion and energy for creativity.

Geometric abstract painting can be said to be the foundation of HUNG’s creations. She built on it by broadening and breaking through the tenet of painting as a mere representation or reproduction of scenes on canvas. During her studies in the UK, she began to restructure the relationship between the elements of canvas, paint and canvas frame. She essentially deconstructed the existing physical framework of painting and extended it into a conceptual spatial structure, allowing paintings to become more than a two-dimensional expression, but a space of sculptural multidimensionality.

After coming back to Taiwan, HUNG continued to deconstruct and reconstruct the relationship between the canvas, paint and frame. She went on to develop a “replication” method to examine and dialectically question the nature of painting and art itself. She first reproduced her own canvas works using fiberglass before coating them with paint. By juxtaposing the coated replicas with the originals, she challenged the discerning ability of viewers to tell them apart. By 2010, she made her own mold to “reproduce” the texture of the canvas with acrylic paint and was able to transplant this layer of paint onto another canvas to create a contrast between the two.

HUNG didn’t consider “replication” as a means of mass production, but rather as an expression of her own notion. She treated the replicas as originals—she was creating brand new textures in the reproduction process, making them all the more conceptually innovative.