The world renowned Taiwanese-American artist, Leigh Li-Yun Wen is showing her newest exhibition, The Four Elements of Leigh Li-Yun Wen, at the Fremin Gallery in New York City this November.

In her newest exhibition, The Four Elements of Leigh Li-Yun Wen, Wen explores the four elements of western cosmology—earth, air, fire, water— while intermingling these concepts with her deep cultural and personal history in a mixed media platform. Growing up on the island of Taiwan has given Wen a deep, personal affinity for the forces of nature, especially that of the elemental power of water. She can constantly feel the ebb and flow of competing cultures as a Taiwanese- American artist who has spent many years in both countries. The ancient philosophies of her homeland, Taiwan, teach self-discipline and selflessness, and this collides and mingles with

the Western notions of ego, alienation, and desire. Wen’s working method is a process of subtraction from darkness to light. “I carved into the paint with a stylus to bring forth the individual lines that are the central motif of my work,” she notes. These lines flow across the canvas in rhythms and frequencies that create depths and swells on the painted surface. Something of the self is lost in the resulting tangle and then regained, only to be lost again. Simplicity and harmony exist within the chaos of the world. Color is used to expand the emotional range in Wen’s work: “my palette is drawn not from appearances but from the lyric and psychic necessities of my art.” The uniformity of line, from edge to edge and painting to painting, implies suppression of the artist’s hand in favor of objectivity learned from nature. In spite of this, her work remains fundamentally autobiographical.

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