Unlike most works depicting women in pregnancy or motherhood, which generally portray images of boundless love, warmth, and maternal affection, Tsai Yi-Ting’s new body of work, produced after giving birth to her son, clearly holds no intention of nurturing these principles or of reassuring her viewers. She has instead kept a diary of sorts, which accounts for this time through painting, and speaks of the complex and mystifying experience of relinquishing oneself in order to bring a new life into the world.

With her New Born, Confinement series, Tsai turned her attention to the profound journeys comprising pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, and the physical and psychological changes that leave indelible marks on every mother. For Tsai, such life-changing transformations are first and foremost a form of violence inflicted by nature. This violence involves the expansion and enlargement of the body, and it might entail mental isolation, caused by the physical and psychological pressures women experience during the thirty-day postpartum confinement period traditionally known in Eastern Asian culture as "sitting the month."

—text excerpt, Chung Wei-Tzu, 2021