Chiao-Han Chueh Presents New Residency Project at 18th Street Arts Center
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Chiao-Han Chueh at 18th street arts center. courtesy of the artist.
Germany-based, Taiwanese artist Chiao-Han Chueh has begun a residency program at 18th Street Arts Center where she continues to develop painting as a system of action and perception.
Chueh’s practice reflects upon her experience growing up in Taiwan and living in the West as an Asian woman, contesting normative gender constraints of women’s bodies by portraying primarily nude female figures engaging in unbridled behavior within fantastical spaces. Her approach to oil painting is both influenced both by Western academia and Chinese calligraphy and ink painting, therefore showing a convergence of her personal experience and aesthetics from diverse artistic traditions.
During the residency, Chueh extends her research into medical imaging systems, including X-rays, anatomical diagrams, and spectral visualization, while further considering the potential of color as a visual language. Medical imagery is not treated here as a direct subject for representation, but is transformed through its blurred forms, heightened colors, and almost visceral visual intensity into a painterly grammar shaped by pressure, speed, material constraints, and bodily perception.
Responding to the image-saturated visual environment of Los Angeles, the residency project examines how embodied experience, personal memory, and mediated images of the body may enter the work as perceptual structures rather than narrative themes.
