Tsai Yi-Ting Star No. 4, 2026

In Star No. 4, a small high-heeled boot is set within a vivid pink landscape. Positioned near the lower center of the composition, the boot appears reflected below, while vertical marks rise in the background beneath a dark blue sky. The work is made with pastel on thick, custom-made paper. Rather than building up successive layers of pigment, Tsai Yi-Ting presses color into the paper’s surface, allowing it to absorb movement, gesture, and emotion. Traces of scratching and rubbing remain visible, emphasizing the physicality of her process.

Tsai’s Star series marks a new phase in the artist’s practice. Known for works rooted in portraiture and her own life experience, Tsai here turns to shoes making objects the central subject of her paintings for the first time. The series reflects the past two years of the artist’s life, a period marked by illness, treatment, pain, and emotional intensity. Shoes hold strong symbolic meaning in Taiwanese culture. Sending shoes to someone can imply a desire for that person to go away, while wearing another person’s shoes is avoided because shoes are seen as vehicles for the soul. In Tsai’s Star series, shoes become repositories of personal and cultural memory, carrying traces of absence, departure, intimacy, and the body that once wore them.

Drawing from personal experience and everyday life, Tsai approaches painting as a diaristic process through which inner states, interpersonal relationships, and shifting identities gradually emerge. Her works oscillate between tenderness and unease, combining delicate material sensitivity with raw emotional intensity. Through intricate surfaces and fluid gestures, Tsai constructs figures that appear simultaneously familiar and estranged, emphasizing the fragile intersections between memory and lived experience.