Ed Pien

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Ed Pien
EdPien.jpg
Born (1958-02-23) February 23, 1958 (age 65)
Taipei, Taiwan
NationalityTaiwan-born Canadian
Education

Ed Pien (born February 23, 1958) is a Canadian contemporary artist, known for his drawings and large-scale drawing-based installations inspired by multiple sources (Inuit as well as European and Chinese) and traditions, [1] printmaking, paper cuts and video and photography. [2] [3] [4]

Contents

Life

Pien was born in 1958 in Taipei, Taiwan, emigrating to Canada at the age of 11 with his family. [5] At a young age, he began to draw and feels drawing propels everything he does. [6] He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Western Ontario (1982) and a Master of Fine Arts from York University (1984). [7]

Pien lives and works in Toronto, where he was a professor in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. [3] He has also been an Artist-in-Residence, Painting and Drawing, Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montreal. [8]

Career

Pien`s practice is drawing-based. For his cut-outs, he uses an X-Acto knife as his drawing tool and traditional Japanese paper, [9] [10] or he constructs maze-like spaces using walls of crinkly paper grounds with drawings on them and through these large-scale installations he fashions a conduit into feeling and thought. [11] He also is a photographer. In 2019, the Glenbow Museum (Calgary) held an exhibition titled Ed Pien: Our Beloved of 144 framed photographs of flowers hung together in a monumental, wall-filling installation to commemorate decorated gravesites at a cemetery in Santiago, Chile which is the final resting place for many political dissidents and victims of the reign of Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990. [12] Also in 2019, he made a ghostly new print at NSCAD in collaboration, as he said, with the Atlantic Ocean. [13] In 2020, to bear witness to the disruptions and unease brought on by the pandemic, he concentrated on making his Invasive Species, series of green-coloured drawings inspired by decorative Chinoiserie patterns as well as carefully observed plants and insects thriving in his own garden. [14]

His work has been exhibited extensively throughout Canada and internationally, including, among others, at the Drawing Centre (New York),the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Canadian Culture Centre in Paris; [15] Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa) partnering with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Cambridge Galleries, The Contemporary Art Museum (Monterrey, Mexico), The Goethe Institute (Berlin), [16] the 18th Edition of the Sydney Biennale and the 5th edition of the Moscow Biennale. [17] The Corridor of Rain was featured at the Curitiba Biennial, in Brazil in 2018. [15] In 2022, he showed Present: Past/Future at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a multisensory environment, which captured moments and memories of elders in Havana, Cuba which he had collected since 2014. [15] It marked a change in his work into documentary film and portrait photography. [18]

Selected public collections

Pien's work is held internationally in the collections of over twenty-five museums, including the National Gallery of Canada, [19] the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Centrum Beeldende Kunst (the Netherlands), Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporaneo (Costa Rica) and the Ordos Art Museum (Mongolia, China). [20]

Publications

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References

  1. Clément, Éric (17 February 2014). "Ed Pien et le nouvel univers inuit". La Presse. Retrieved 27 May 2016.
  2. Delgado, Jerome (6 October 2018). "Ed Pien and his ghosts: twenty years of drawings". www.ledevoir.com. Le Devoir, Oct 6, 2018. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
  3. 1 2 Catherine de Zegher (30 June 2016). Ed Pien: Luminous Shadows. Black Dog Publishing. ISBN   978-1-910433-96-6.
  4. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. Art & Collection Group. 2007.
  5. "Artist/Maker Name "Pien, Ed"". Canadian Heritage Information Network. Retrieved 27 May 2016.
  6. Enright, Robert. "The Art of Being What It Doesn't Have to Be: An Interview with Ed Pien". bordercrossingsmag.com. Border Crossings 115, Sept 2010. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
  7. "Ed Pien: The Promise of Solitude". Koffler Centre of the Arts. Retrieved 27 May 2016.
  8. "Ed Pien". www.concordia.ca. Concordia University, Montreal. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  9. "SHADOW PUPPETS". ago.ca. Art Gallery of Ontario. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
  10. "Field Trip: Artist Talk with Ed Pien". www.youtube.com. You Tube/ Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
  11. Rodgers, Margaret. "Ed Pien: In a Realm of Others". www.erudit.org. Espace Sculpture, (74), 41–42. Retrieved 17 August 2020.
  12. "Ed Pien Our Beloved". www.glenbow.org. Glenbow Museum. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
  13. Hosein, Lise. "Article". www.cbc.ca. Retrieved 21 October 2023.
  14. "Ed Pien". www.youtube.com. You Tube. Retrieved 13 July 2021.
  15. 1 2 3 "Ed Pien: Present: Past/Future". ago.ca. Art Gallery of Ontario. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
  16. "Ed Pien". www..org. Musée Joliette. Retrieved 12 July 2021.
  17. "Conversations in Contemporary Art Presents Ed Pien". Concordia University. Retrieved 27 May 2016.
  18. "Ed Pien: Past, Present, Future". www.gallerieswest.ca. Galleries West Magazine. 25 July 2022. Retrieved 28 July 2022.
  19. "Collections: Ed Pien 1958 -". National Gallery of Canada. Retrieved 29 May 2016.
  20. "Ed Pien". www.cacnart.com. Canada and China Contemporary Art Communications. Retrieved 12 July 2021.

Further reading