“Starting at the age of 5, my mother started training me in traditional Chinese Calligraphy and painting, in hopes for me to not lose my Taiwanese heritage. I vividly remember the feeling of wanting to rebel (for the practice of Chinese calligraphy exists in repetition) against the ritual of writing the same character over and over hundreds and thousands of times. During that time, I expressed this sense of rebellion by taking characters and reinventing them with an extra flick of the brush in the wrong direction and being over the top with performative gestures during my calligraphy lessons. That feeling continues to heavily influence my current creative process – turning ink into metal, searching for symbiosis between form and text. My work has been an ode to these memories and personal history, manifesting as works of dynamic movement and gestures.”

— Gwen Yen Chiu, 2025