Ed Pien’s second solo exhibition at Pierre François Ouellette art contemporain entitled Treacherous Lines, consists of a new body of work that includes paper cuts, drawings and an installation of a rope-grid corridor created through a network of tied knots.
By means of the brutality and beauty of line, Pien continues to explore themes of transformation, the monstrous other, and what Lee Henderson has termed, “the poetry of unreason,” across all three media. No aspect can be taken for granted: each work builds upon the other, weaving a rich and complex experience.
In Corridor space is manipulated while lines, in the form of ropes are intertwined and knotted to create complex relationships. This new work alludes to a sense of the body and other organic systems and plays off Pien’s drawings. The drawings shown in the Treacherous Lines exhibition continue the artist’s exploration and celebration of the other, the grotesque and other-worldly, while maintaining a distinctive investigation of mark making in a confident and unhindered drawing process. Pien’s paper-cuts continue to grow in complexity and emanate energetic wonder and mystery. They have a unique conversation with both the knot-works and the drawings.
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Ed Pien was born in Taipei, Taiwan and moved to Canada when he was 11 years old. He received his Master of Fine Arts from York University in 1984. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, in venues that include The Drawing Centre, New York; La Biennale de Montréal; W139, Amsterdam;
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; and the Goethe Institute, Berlin. His work is in the collections of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporaneo, Costa Rica, Museum London, the Weatherspoon Art Museum and University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.
