Artist Talks

Lee Chun-yi

The cosmopolitan diaspora artist Lee Chun-yi (born Taiwan, 1965) moved to Hong Kong as a youth, pursued graduate studies in the United States, and returned to Taiwan to embark on an artistic career. With a revolutionary method departing from the conventional use of a paintbrush, Lee Chun-Yi employs calligraphy through the use of Chinese seals and ink rubbings. He carves Chinese characters into pieces of soft wood to form chops, then stamps them repetitively on the paper to form a semi-photographic image. Literally building up a visual composition through words, his paintings function as symbolic poems, with the strength of the stamp indicating the intended tone of expression.

Lee has participated in over 30 group and solo exhibitions internationally. His works have been collected by the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Harvard University, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Phoenix Art Museum, USA; the Jiangsu Art Museum, the Qingdao Art Museum, China; the National Arts Education Institute, Taipei; the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and other public and private collections.

Henning von Mirbach

Henning von Mirbach serves as Assistant Professor of Chinese Art History in the Department of Fine Arts at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, Taiwan. Initially trained as a lawyer with degrees from universities in Paris and Berlin, he received his Ph.D. in Chinese Art History in December 2022 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before joining National Taiwan Normal University, he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, in the UK, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica in Taiwan. His research focuses on artistic and performative engagements with landscape in early modern China, circa 1500 – 1800, and aims to foster new understandings by studying socially and historiographically marginalized positions and focusing particularly on regional diversity. In addition, he is interested in contemporary ink art. He has written on Lee Chun-Yi and his art in the past and will present more work on contemporary ink artists active in Taiwan during a scholarly conference to be held in Edinburgh, UK, in autumn 2025.