Yeh Jen-Kun was born in 1984 in Taoyuan, Taiwan. He currently lives and works in Taipei. Yeh completed his B.A. in fine arts at the Chinese Culture University of Taiwan in 2008 and M.F.A. at Taipei National University of the Arts in 2011. Yeh has held solo exhibitions in major art institutions in Taipei and has participated in international art fairs and exhibitions including Art Taipei, ART15 in London and the Taiwan Biennial. His works have been collected by institutions including the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the Long Yen Foundation and the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney.
Yeh Jen-Kun delves into the relationship between humanity and the urban city, a man-made world. People often associate a metropolis with tall buildings, mass transit and busy sidewalks but Yeh depicts the city as an uncanny lost space. The ‘uncanny’ is a Freudian concept – a psychological experience that locates the strangeness of the familiar, confronting the subject with the unconscious, repressed desire. Since 2008, Yeh began to create a series of landscape paintings that evoke memories of a city based on what lives in his mind through reconstructing and assembling. In the process, Yeh painstakingly excavates pieces of memories that connect self and space. The ruin-like cement structures in Yeh’s works respond to the desolate spaces that have been neglected in real life. Yeh’s paintings exude a subtle surrealistic and dream-like ambiance. Yeh does not deliberately refer to any time or space, yet his works retain a sense of familiarity to viewers.
