Chiu Chien-Jen 緩緩落下 Falling, Slowly, 2026

Chiu Chien-Jen’s paintings challenge the relationship between image, memory, and perception. Having worked with photography before turning to painting at the end of his studies, Chiu developed a practice that occupies a grey zone between documentation and invention. His compositions often derive from photographs taken during everyday life and travels, as well as from images circulating through news media and the internet. Urban environments, industrial structures, stations, streets, architectural passages, and anonymous figures emerge through layered brushwork as fragments of recollection. Using low-saturation palettes, repeated scraping and accumulation of pigment, dripping gestures, and blurred silhouettes, Chiu creates atmospheric spaces suspended between figuration and abstraction. He often applies paint in a way that allows it to cascade down the canvas, introducing volatile solvents and moving the support so that controlled gestures give way to unpredictable traces.

Emerging in the early 2000s, at a moment when Taiwan’s contemporary art scene was largely oriented toward video and installation, his work helped reopen a discussion around painting as a contemporary medium. Through oil painting, Chiu renders layers and textures that photography or film alone could not convey, reflecting on modern urban life, alienation, and the fragile presence of the figure within an image-saturated world.