Chiu Wei-Hsiang: Toil and Soil

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Toil and Soil, Chiu Wei-Hsiang’s exhibition opens on 10 September. Born in 1997 in Dayuan, Taoyuan, Taiwan, Chiu grew up among soil, rice waves, courtyard animals, and market bustle—a world erased by the government’s Aerotropolis project that scattered his family and severed rooted bonds. For him, painting is not nostalgia but a deliberate act of regrounding: a defiant counter to erasure.

Daylight is toil, nightfall is soil. In his full-time occupation at the care facility, Chiu Wei-Hsiang confronts aging and death daily. His labor is consumed by systemic demand yet rendered invisible by its logic. He refuses to reduce elders to cases, painting their vitality and returning dignity denied by institutional structures. His images grow from this double ground: invisible labor and the soil of resistance. He paints flowers, fruits, landscapes and self-portraits with raw, unvarnished lines and deliberately incomplete compositions. Drawing “earthiness” (túwèi) from lost land and deceased loved ones, he renders images from memory as a conscious effort to know himself.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Chiu Wei-Hsiang (b.1997, Taiwan) graduated from the National Taiwan University of Arts in 2020 and lives in Taipei. Bound by family responsibility, Chiu has managed a nursing institution full-time, relegating his painting practice to nocturnal hours. This dual existence: care labor by day, artistic labor by night, defines the urgency and immediacy of his work. His rapid brushstrokes on paper and canvas capture everyday objects as fleeting memory, while deliberately rejecting the strictures of academic calligraphy and painting. From a childlike vantage, he summons residual traces of lived experience, restoring visibility to lives society routinely overlooks. His practice is both cultivation of personal memory and critique of systemic neglect, articulating an artistic language that insists on the political weight of the marginal.