BIOGRAPHY

Li Tzu-Wei (born 1997)
Graduated with a Master’s degree from the Graduate Institute of Fine Arts, National Taichung University of Education. From an early age, I have been deeply passionate about painting. Although I did not receive formal training in specialized art programs, I began attending studio courses after school during my secondary education, cultivating a consistent enthusiasm for artistic creation and self-exploration. To me, art has never been merely a matter of technical proficiency—it is an extension of perception and a way of recording life. I believe that artistic growth comes from sustained observation and experience, allowing painting to become my language of dialogue with the world.

During my undergraduate years, I primarily worked with water-based media, using landscapes as an entry point to explore my inner sensibility. The fluidity and unpredictability of water became a poetic metaphor for emotion and the passage of time. Through experiments with ground textures and the material qualities of paint, I sought a personal rhythm and breath between figuration and abstraction. This process allowed emotion and surface to resonate with one another—each layer of pigment, each trace of transparency, reflecting the subtle tension between seeing and being.

In graduate school, my focus turned toward reflecting on life experience and the relationship between humans and nature. My works center on the imagery of “human–plant interweaving,” where the forms of plants and the human body merge to explore coexistence and transformation. I regard painting as a poetic contemplation of existence—where growth, decay, and regeneration mirror emotional and temporal cycles. Rather than loud declarations, I seek to evoke quiet dialogues through light, color, and texture, allowing viewers to sense the pulse of life and the delicate resonance between nature and emotion. This approach embodies my artistic identity: to explore, through painting, the subtle boundary where humanity and nature converge—where poetry and reason coexist, and where art becomes a tangible language of time and perception.

I have always believed that painting is not merely a form of representation but an act of contemplation—an extension of perception that allows me to observe the rhythm of life itself. From my early fascination with nature to my ongoing exploration of the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants, creation has become a process of tracing the subtle pulse of existence. Between stillness and motion, reality and illusion, I search for the fleeting moments when light, time, and emotion converge—moments that reveal the quiet resonance between myself and the natural world.

My recent body of work centers on the theme of human–plant interweaving. Through the forms, textures, and organic growth of plants, I reflect on human emotion, memory, and being. As the boundaries between the human body and vegetation dissolve, the figures in my paintings evolve into spiritual symbols—manifestations of internal energy and transformation rather than external appearance. Painting, for me, becomes a poetic structure through which I translate the invisible into the visible, transforming the intertwined relationship between humanity and nature into a language of visual sensibility.

I work primarily with oil and water-based media, emphasizing the transparency, fluidity, and unpredictability of pigments. These material characteristics embody the essence of time and the transience of emotion. To me, painting is the act of “holding the ephemeral,” of bridging the material and the spiritual through layers of color and texture. My creative practice is both an observation of the world and a dialogue with it—a process of reconciliation between nature and the self. I hope viewers may sense, within my works, the quiet breath of life and the pulse of transformation, and in that stillness, rediscover humanity’s place within the natural continuum.

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