Chinoiseries
The monochrome blue drawings are in the spirit of a suite of ink works entitled Re-Imaginings. The work references the iconic delft blue colour of Chinoiserie that has originated from the 18th century. The images and style from Re-Imaginings references in part, the Rococo design of the French artist, Jean Pillement’s engravings from A New Book of Chinese Ornaments, as well as from the more fantastical etchings of Victorien Sardou from the 19th century. For Pien's drawings, a carefully diluted ink mixture allows the colour to slightly bleed, mimicking the effect of hand-painted ceramic glazes. Although the 19th century drawings are floral and patterned, Pien's series of works are replete with hybridized and interconnected creatures. Here, they subtly reference the caricaturization of "Orientals" in the late 1800's to the early 1900's while celebrating the persistent defiance of difference.
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Ed Pien is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Pien has exhibited nationally and internationally including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Drawing Centre, New York; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Centro Nacional é las Artes, Mexico City; the Goethe Institute, Berlin; Middlesbrough Art Gallery, UK; W139, Amsterdam; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Contemporary Art Museum in Monterrey, Mexico; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and La Biennale de Montreal 2000 and 2002 and recently at the Moscow Bienale (2013), Sydney Biennale (2012) and in the Oh Canada exhibition at MassMoca. His ambitious large-scale installations, drawings and paper cuts are featured in the permanent collections of many Canadian museums including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. His work was featured in the Canadian Biennale of the National Gallery of Canada in 2011 and 2015.
Pien draws on sources both Eastern and Western to create his work, including Asian ghost stories, hell scrolls, calligraphic traditions and the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, creating sensual, drawing-based installations using ink and translucent paper (like Earthly Delights in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). The spectator is invited to walk into these floor-to-ceiling environments and approach the half-human, half-animal monsters within. In his most recent body of work, Pien has replaced ink and gouache with an xacto knife in order to produce large-scale paper cuts. In the summer of 2004, he travelled to China to continue research on myths and legends found in Chinese folklore; he returned from the trip excited about a form of art that is centuries old in its tradition.
