Ed Pien was born in Taipei, Taiwan and moved to Canada when he was 11 years old. He received his Master of Fine Arts from York University in 1984. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, in venues that include The Drawing Centre, New York; La Biennale de Montréal; W139, Amsterdam;
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; and the Goethe Institute, Berlin. His work is in the collections of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporaneo, Costa Rica, Museum London, the Weatherspoon Art Museum and University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.

Pien draws on sources both Eastern and Western to create his work, including Asian ghost stories, hell scrolls, calligraphic traditions and the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, creating sensual, drawing-based installations using ink and translucent paper (like Earthly Delights in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). The spectator is invited to walk into these floor-to-ceiling environments and approach the half-human, half-animal monsters within. In his most recent body of work, Pien has replaced ink and gouache with an xacto knife in order to produce large-scale paper cuts. In the summer of 2004, he travelled to China to continue research on myths and legends found in Chinese folklore; he returned from the trip excited about a form of art that is centuries old in its tradition.1

The artist states: “I resort to the use of large-scale to counter this craft-based process and attempt to avoid and sense of sentimentality and preciousness that seem to go hand-in-hand with most paper-cuts”

Throughout his career, Pien has considered himself indebted to both Western and Eastern sources for his imagery. He has looked to American artist Kara Walker who took the tradition of paper silhouettes, producing large-scale installations of them that deal with race, gender and sexuality. Pien, in Night Gathering, a paper-cut that consists of three life-sized figures crouching and sitting in a tree (presented at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain in 2006) has directly referenced the work of 17th century graphic artist Jacques Callot. Callot was considered to be one of the first great artists to practice graphic arts exclusively. He is perhaps best remembered for a series of etchings documenting the Thirty Years’ War entitled Les misères et les malheurs de la guerre. The particular work that interested Pien was a gruesome etching of people hanging from a tree; Pien has toned down the violence of the imagery by placing his figures in the tree, lending work a more playful and poetic tone. The scale of the work (260 x 488 cm), however, continues to intimidate – we are unsure of what these figures are doing tucked away in the tree. Are they hiding or waiting to attack?

It is this incongruity in Pien’s work that is both disturbing and engaging: the delicacy of paper is juxtaposed to the night marish images that emerge from the intricate cuts, the folklore tradition of the paper-cut is turned inside out to reveal images that both alarm and lure us with their intricate beauty.


1. Gordon Hatt, Tila Kellman & Linda Jansma, “Ed Pien: In a Realm of Others”, Southern Alberta Art Gallery / Robert McLaughlin Gallery (01/2006), p36-37