| Ed Pien | |
| Birth Date: | 23 February 1958 |
| Birth Place: | Taipei, Taiwan |
| Nationality: | Taiwan-born Canadian |
Ed Pien (born February 23, 1958) is a Canadian contemporary artist, known for his drawings and large-scale drawing-based installations inspired by multiple sources (Inuit as well as European and Chinese) and traditions,[1] printmaking, paper cuts and video and photography.[2] [3] [4]
Pien was born in 1958 in Taipei, Taiwan, emigrating to Canada at the age of 11 with his family.[5] At a young age, he began to draw and feels drawing propels everything he does.[6] He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Western Ontario (1982) and a Master of Fine Arts from York University (1984).[7]
Pien lives and works in Toronto, where he was a professor in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. He has also been an Artist-in-Residence, Painting and Drawing, Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montreal.[8]
Pien`s practice is drawing-based. For his cut-outs, he uses an X-Acto knife as his drawing tool and traditional Japanese paper,[9] [10] or he constructs maze-like spaces using walls of crinkly paper grounds with drawings on them and through these large-scale installations he fashions a conduit into feeling and thought.[11] He also is a photographer. In 2019, the Glenbow Museum (Calgary) held an exhibition titled Ed Pien: Our Beloved of 144 framed photographs of flowers hung together in a monumental, wall-filling installation to commemorate decorated gravesites at a cemetery in Santiago, Chile which is the final resting place for many political dissidents and victims of the reign of Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990.[12] Also in 2019, he made a ghostly new print at NSCAD in collaboration, as he said, with the Atlantic Ocean.[13] In 2020, to bear witness to the disruptions and unease brought on by the pandemic, he concentrated on making his Invasive Species, series of green-coloured drawings inspired by decorative Chinoiserie patterns as well as carefully observed plants and insects thriving in his own garden.[14]
His work has been exhibited extensively throughout Canada and internationally, including, among others, at the Drawing Centre (New York),the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Canadian Culture Centre in Paris; Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa) partnering with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Cambridge Galleries,The Contemporary Art Museum (Monterrey, Mexico), The Goethe Institute (Berlin),[15] the 18th Edition of the Sydney Biennale and the 5th edition of the Moscow Biennale.[16] The Corridor of Rain was featured at the Curitiba Biennial, in Brazil in 2018. In 2022, he showed Present: Past/Future at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a multisensory environment, which captured moments and memories of elders in Havana, Cuba which he had collected since 2014.[17] It marked a change in his work into documentary film and portrait photography.[18]
Pien's work is held internationally in the collections of over twenty-five museums, including the National Gallery of Canada,[19] the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Centrum Beeldende Kunst (the Netherlands), Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporaneo (Costa Rica) and the Ordos Art Museum (Mongolia, China).[20]