Children, with their minds still developing, generally love to draw. Since childhood, I have always drawn constantly. I grew up in an era without cell phones or social media, when my favorite pastime was reading comic books. I collected them passionately, and by copying their pages I began to create my own stories. This was how I first learned to draw and to build narratives.
There is an artist from the past whom I greatly admire: Isamu Noguchi, a sculptor who worked prolifically between the 1950s and 1980s. It is said that, in his later years, Noguchi stood before a massive stone his primary sculptural material and told his assistant: One day, I will enter this stone! Today, visitors to his former studio, now a museum, will find this stone in the garden. Quite literally, his ashes rest within it.
I have spent much of my life drawing. At its essence, drawing is the act of taking a pigment, such as a pencil and leaving marks on a neutral surface. I have always been fascinated by large scale work, and one day I wondered: What if I could actually step inside my drawings, as Noguchi had imagined with his stone? Around ten years ago, I began creating immersive spherical drawings, environments that audiences could physically enter. These installations have since been exhibited in the United States, Brazil, Japan, China, and Belgium.
This summer, I present a new installation, The Changhua Garden, created for the Changhua Walker Art Festival 2025, in southern Taiwan. For this project, I imagined a vast garden of memories, represented by diverse flowers connected through winding, sometimes thorny stems. Executed in a simple yet striking manner black lines drawn across a white surface the installation spans 10 meters in width and 5 meters in height. It serves as a metaphor for my brain, inviting the public to step inside my mind. Because of its monumental scale, the work was conceived digitally and then printed in large format.
Human beings have drawn since prehistoric times. Times change rapidly, but I believe there is still infinite potential for artists to express ideas through the timeless act of drawing.
