Grooving & Resonance — Fok Wai Chung × I-Chun Chen Duo Exhibition
by Lyau Kang-Ywe
by Lyau Kang-Ywe
With long-standing experience in thangka painting, Fok Wai Chung inhabits a world that is quiet without ever being distant.
Into her intricate inner cosmos she gathers the subconscious, the spiritual, memory and feeling. Flowers, celestial bodies and otherworldly landscapes may seem far removed from reality, yet each canvas conceals traces and symbols left behind by lived experience. These subtle hints keep her garden of the mind from becoming entirely severed from the world. She gathers fragments from the dust of the everyday and replants them within the garden of the spirit. Her paintings read as a record of the life and cultivation of this inner garden.
I-Chun Chen, long engaged with images, animation, digital media and AI-generated work, turns here toward something more elemental: the direct and raw gesture of hand painting. Her newly conceived series, Weightless Playlist, transforms a journey through Egypt—the windblown sand, speed, strange sounds, skin and organs—into sound waves, bodily movements and algorithmic paths, before translating them once again into painting.
For this body of work, Chen turns away from technological polish and toward an experience that is fractured, luminous, unruly and, in the same breath, joyful.
Stillness, in Fok Wai Chung’s hands, holds its own vitality. Motion, in Chen’s, carries an unguarded candour. Fok Wai Chung’s classicism is not nostalgia, but a belief in transforming a longing for beauty in the present. Chen’s engagement with the contemporary and the technological affirms, in turn, the value of embodied experience in human art.
Two sensibilities, disparate in temperament and form, meet through collision and response, generating a new resonance without erasing their differences.
Grooving & Resonance is not an exhibition in search of synchrony. It is the resonance that arises when two distinct lives collide, respond to one another and generate something new.
有限之中的無限 The Infinite Within the Finite
60 × 120 cm, 2026
Mineral pigment on canvas
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself –
Finite Infinity.
— Emily Dickinson
We drift as if upon the boundless seas of a multiverse, quietly pursuing the essence and meaning of life within the sanctuary of this garden.
TRACK 01|小調 Minor Key
120 × 90 × 5 cm, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
Minor Key continues my impressions of the body and sound while dune-bashing in the Egyptian desert. It also stems from a different understanding of rhythm and emotion that emerged through learning music production.
The off-road vehicle rose and fell at high speed between the dunes. Some people screamed, while others laughed wildly. As someone with a more introverted temperament, I barely made a sound, yet internally I continued responding to everything before me. The “like” symbol in the painting resembles a sound left unspoken, becoming a quiet inner response.
The work also incorporates the concept of string instruments. The dragging and stretching movement between the bow and the string while playing evokes for me the relationship between lines and sound. I therefore replaced the paintbrush with paint-covered cords, dragging, swinging and waving them across the canvas, allowing bodily movement to transform into linear traces that extend like the sound of strings.
Minor Key is not about sadness, but about a more restrained kind of sound: something that is not spoken aloud, yet continues to vibrate within the body and across the image.
TRACK 02|大調 Major Key
120 × 90 × 5 cm, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
Major Key also responds to the experience of dune-bashing in Egypt, but transforms that memory into a more outward-reaching sound, rhythm and bodily energy.
The jeep surged up the dunes before sliding rapidly down from the heights. Screams, laughter, wind and engine sounds emerged simultaneously. Each person’s body seemed to become a different musical note, forming an improvised composition within the same moving space.
Compared with the string-like dragging and extension of Minor Key, Major Key introduces stronger images of rhythm and percussion. The paint-covered cords were swung and struck against the canvas with greater force. Lines overlap in abundance and paint splashes across the surface, like drumbeats falling again and again, transforming sound into visual rhythm and impact.
Major Key leaves behind a life rhythm that expands outward. Different people, different sounds and different bodies come together in a brief encounter, forming an energetic ensemble.
TRACK 03|飆沙 Desert Rush
36 × 36 × 5 cm, 2026
Acrylic and sand on canvas
This work was inspired by my experience in the Egyptian desert. At the time, I was sitting inside a jeep travelling at high speed. Amid the intense shaking and movement, I felt myself enclosed within a mechanical space. The vast desert and the small vehicle formed a powerful contrast, while the human body existed within this tiny mechanical environment, with the blood seemingly flowing rapidly through an enclosed vessel.
The jeep sped, descended and skidded across the tops of the dunes, producing an intense sensation of weightlessness. The body was thrown into space, as if the soul had been separated from the body.
The tracks left by the wheels in the sand resemble blood vessels and pulses within the human body, extending outward and vibrating continuously. The lines and flowing forms in the work come from my sensations of speed, pressure, excitement and weightlessness. They express both the smallness of the human being within the vastness of nature and a mental state in which bodily sensation and speed merge into one.
Desert Rush attempts to depict a sensory experience between tension and freedom, as well as the energetic relationship that moves between the machine, the body and nature.
TRACK 04|特寫 Close-Up
36 × 36 × 5 cm, 2026
Acrylic and sand on canvas
Close-Up originates from my experience of spatial scale in the Egyptian desert, and is also connected to my previous experience of using drones and observing changes in altitude and viewing distance.
Standing in a desert with almost no boundaries, everything within sight was an ever-expanding field of yellow. This reminded me of the way we see when a drone rises and descends: the altitude constantly changes, and the scenery on the screen enlarges and shrinks accordingly. Yet in the desert, whether the line of sight rose or fell, it still seemed to remain within a similar expanse of yellow.
More strangely, the ground beneath my feet had once been the geological space of an ancient ocean. Although I was clearly standing on the surface of the earth, my consciousness seemed to be falling into another time and depth.
The sky, the desert and the ancient seabed therefore overlapped with one another. Close-Up is no longer concerned only with distance, but with the question of where we are when space loses its coordinates: How high above the world are we at this moment, and how deep within it do we stand?
TRACK 05|風中的絲巾 Scarf in the Wind
45 × 80 × 5 cm, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
During a journey through Egypt, the women travelling with me raised their sun-protective scarves into the air. The wind suddenly lifted the fabric, and the scarves turned, twisted and fluttered in the sunlight. At that moment, everyone began to laugh with happiness. It was a brief scene, yet it became one of the most vivid memories of the journey.
Watching the scarf constantly change shape also brought back my past experience of studying 3D animation. In a virtual space, the movement of wind and fabric must be constructed through physical simulations involving fluid dynamics, gravity and collision. The scarf before my eyes, however, completed these complex transformations naturally in the real world.
Wind has no physical form, yet it became visible through the movement of the fabric. In that moment, the real world and my experience of 3D animation briefly overlapped. What remained was the sunlight, the flying scarf, the sound of laughter and the instant when life was unexpectedly touched.
TRACK 06|也許沒有未來神話 Perhaps There Is No Future Myth
120 × 90 × 5 cm, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
The Egyptian myths that once existed in books and the imagination suddenly appeared before my eyes at a tangible scale during this journey. Deities, murals and histories from thousands of years ago intersected with my everyday experience of using AI to generate images, producing a sense of temporal and spiritual dislocation.
This dislocation also entered the method of painting. When drawing in Photoshop, digital brushes can imitate oil paint. In AI-generated images, objects often appear blurred, misaligned or physically inaccurate, as if the pixels themselves were drifting apart. In the actual oil paintings, I therefore reversed the process, using paint to imitate these digital brushstrokes and the inaccuracies of AI-generated imagery.
Computers once simulated painting. Now painting has turned back to simulate AI. Ancient myths, actual history and generated images overlap with one another. Are we looking at myths left behind by the past, or are we creating the future myths that have not yet arrived?
TRACK 07|翻白眼 Eye Roll
22.5 × 15.5 × 2 cm, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
As a heavy user of the internet and AI, emojis have long been part of my everyday language for responding to the world. Very often, a simple image can take the place of an emotion that is difficult to explain clearly.
Eye Roll deliberately leaves the eyes without pupils. Once the position of the pupils changes, or different forms, symbols and lines are added, the same image can produce an entirely different emotion. It is therefore not a fixed facial expression, but more like an emotional interface waiting to be filled.
This also responds to the experience of Desert Rush: the same vehicle, the same desert and the same moment of weightlessness may produce screams from one person, laughter from another and silence from someone else. The world may remain the same, but each person’s experience is different. Through a playful internet reference, Eye Roll leaves behind a gaze that has not yet been determined.
TRACK 08|大翻白眼 Big Eye Roll
36 × 36 × 5 cm, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
Big Eye Roll enlarges the small facial expression originally found on a mobile phone screen to a scale approaching that of the human body. It further shifts painting from an act of “looking” toward one of “participating.”
The completion of the work does not mean that the creative process has truly ended. A collector may choose to personally add their own gaze, lines or symbols, allowing the work to continue taking place within another person’s life. Alternatively, they may choose to do nothing and allow the blank space to remain. Both intervention and non-intervention are choices permitted by the work.
For me, this also changes the meaning of “completion” in painting. The work no longer ends only at the moment when the artist leaves the canvas. It may continue to transform when it is viewed, collected or even encountered again many years later. The artist leaves the eyes; the viewer determines the gaze. The blank space itself is also a form of expression.
牧羊人 2026
高清單頻錄像 Single channel HD video
Edition 6 + 2 AP
[Verse 1]
黃昏把沙丘摺成沉默的信
風沿著邊界寄來你的姓名
天上的星各自亮著宿命
而我在荒原學習失去光影
[Verse 2]
一抹白紗從高處緩緩降臨
輕落在女子尚未醒來的眉心
烈日忽然收回全部聲音
遠方駝鈴穿越時間的彎
有人朝我走來 很慢 很近
[Pre-Chorus]
額前發燙 像舊傷再次甦醒
你的掌心落下安靜的陰影
羊奶一滴一滴回到唇邊
乾裂的人間開始有了回音
[Chorus]
沙哈拉羊奶流進我的心井
把多年乾旱一寸一寸喚醒
若不是你在風沙裡等命運
我仍漂流在沒有岸的夜裡
[Verse 3]
夜色沿著地平線慢慢蔓延
鈴聲像誰遺落的從前
荒漠的影子由白轉黑
萬物在黑暗之前學會告別
[Bridge]
夢裡沙丘化作無人的神殿
Anubis 守著古老衡量的時間
天秤上放著愛與虧欠
真理之羽落下 比思念更輕
[Final Chorus]
沙哈拉羊奶流進我的心井
把荒年的孤單溫柔灌溉成林
若這一生只是為與你相認
願陪你走過所有無名沙境
[Outro]
風還吹著 沙還移動著
而我終於有了可以抵達的地方
[Verse 1]
At dusk, the dunes fold into a silent letter
The wind sends your name along the border
The stars above each shine according to their fate
And in the wilderness, I learn to lose light and shadow
[Verse 2]
A veil of white slowly descends from above
And gently falls upon the brow of a woman not yet awake
The blazing sun suddenly withdraws every sound
Distant camel bells cross the curve of time
Someone walks toward me, slowly, coming near
[Pre-Chorus]
My forehead burns, like an old wound awakening once again
The quiet shadow of your palm falls upon me
A drop of milk returns, drop by drop, to my lips
The cracked earth of humanity begins to echo
[Chorus]
Sahara’s goat milk flows into the well of my heart
Awakening years of drought, inch by inch
If you had not waited for fate among the blowing sands
I would still be drifting through a shoreless night
[Verse 3]
Night slowly spreads along the horizon
The bells sound like something someone left behind
The desert shadows turn from white to black
Before darkness arrives, all things learn to say goodbye
[Bridge]
In my dream, the dunes become a deserted temple
Anubis guards the ancient measure of time
Love and indebtedness are placed upon the scales
The feather of truth falls lighter than longing
[Final Chorus]
Sahara’s goat milk flows into the well of my heart
Gently watering the loneliness of barren years into a forest
If this life exists only so that I may recognize you
I will walk beside you through every unnamed desert
[Outro]
The wind is still blowing, the sand is still moving
And at last, I have somewhere I can arrive
Grooving & Resonance — Fok Wai Chung × I-Chun Chen
Curator | Lyau Kang-Ywe
Exhibition period | October 17–November 28, 2026
Opening reception | October 17, 2026, 3:00 p.m.
Venue | Enlighten Gallery
(1F, No. 222, Shidong Road, Shilin District, Taipei City)
Tel | +886-2-28310558