Whitechapel Gallery explores the spaces where Li Yuan-chia, Tehching Hsieh bring art to life

March 29, 2022

The Culture Division of the Taipei Representative Office in the United Kingdom (TRO), with the support of the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan, has helped bring the work of Taiwanese artists Li Yuan-chia and Tehching Hsieh to London. Their artwork will feature in Whitechapel Gallery’s Spring Exhibition, ‘A Century of the Artist’s Studio 1920-2020’, open to the public from 22nd February to 5th June. 

All works of art come to being in a particular time and place, and for most, that place is the artist’s studio. This multi-media exhibition explores the original contexts in which art is created, and considers ways in which the studio itself can become a work of art. The exhibition will present paintings, sculptures, illustrations, and film depicting the creative possibilities of the studio, as well as a series of ‘studio corners’ which recreate the actual environments in which great artists have worked. The exhibition will bring together more than 100 works by over 80 artists and collectives from Europe, Africa, South Asia, China, Japan, North and South America, the Middle East, and Australasia. 

The diversity and infinite possibilities of the artist’s studio are encapsulated in the two Taiwanese artists featured in this exhibition, Li Yuan-chia and Tehching Hsieh. The exhibition imagines the artist’s studio as both public and/or private space, sometimes akin to a factory or political collective, at other times a home, laboratory, or refuge from the outside world. No two creative processes are alike, and the diverse manifestations of the artist’s studio give testament to the different manners in which artists have sought to create, maintain, and utilise the space in which they work. 

For Li Yuan-chia, the studio was a public space. In this exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery presents the work of the LYC Museum and Art Gallery, founded by Li Yuan-chia and operating from 1972 to 1982. Li, an abstract painter and pioneer of conceptual art in Taiwan, travelled to Europe in the 60s before settling in Cumbria in northern England in 1968. He opened the LYC Museum in a refurbished barn in the Lake District, holding over 200 exhibitions and presenting work by over 300 artists, many of them local to the area.  The exhibition will showcase a model of the LYC Museum and Art Gallery as well as artwork by Li Yuan-chia, demonstrating how the artist’s studio can serve as a creative nexus for the local community. 

For Tehching Hsieh, meanwhile, the artist’s studio could be a wooden cage, a bare room, or even the streets of a city: less a conventional ‘space’, as Whitechapel Gallery’s curatorial team explain, than an abstraction that remains embedded in his own life. That time and space are both a kind of confinement is crucial to Hsieh’s famous series of ‘One Year Performances’, each completed over the course of a calendar year during the period 1978 to 1986. For his 1980-1981 One Year Performance, ‘Time Clock Piece’, Hsieh entered his studio to punch a time clock every hour on the hour, taking a photo each time. Hsieh’s work is bounded not by physical location, but by the passage of time – an intensely personal space which can only be experienced ‘inside’ the confines of the artist’s own life. 

Chen Pin-chuan, Director of the Cultural Division of the TRO, comments that Whitechapel Gallery is an icon of the UK arts scene, occupying a vantage point among the UK’s art galleries and museums. This exhibition helps to highlight the creativity of Taiwan’s art and culture which gave rise to the internationally-recognised works included in this collection.  Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture is planning to support Whitechapel Gallery’s other exhibition, by arranging a curatorial research trip to Taiwan. Director Chen is pleased to see this series of events aimed at helping the audiences gain a rich understanding of contemporary Taiwanese art, thereby facilitating opportunities for more works from Taiwan to be selected for exhibition. In particular, he hopes that film and video art, a key strength of Whitechapel Gallery, might provide more opportunities for cooperation.