Chiu Wei-Hsiang’s painting is cultivation that begins with loss. Born in 1997 in Dayuan, Taoyuan, Taiwan, he grew up among soil, rice waves, courtyard animals, and the bustle of the market, a world erased by the government’s Aerotropolis project. His grandfather was neighborhood chief, his family large and rooted. Demolition scattered kin and severed bonds. Painting became his act of regrounding: not nostalgia, but a defiant counter to erasure. Toil and Soil, presented by gdm Hong Kong, situates this cultivation in the fissures between demolition and memory, caregiving and creation, disappearance and survival.
From rural childhood to assisting the family’s wet market stall, and now full-time labor in a nursing institution, farming as repetition and endurance anchors his practice. Daylight is toil, nightfall is soil. In the care facility, Chiu confronts aging and death daily. His labor is consumed by systemic demand yet rendered invisible by its logic. He refuses to reduce elders to cases, painting their vitality and returning dignity denied by institutional structures. His images grow from this double ground: invisible labor and the soil of resistance.
For Chiu, painting is labor as vital as living itself, and a testimony that speaks through silence. As a child, his tipsy grandfather once asked, “Are you mute?” The remark exposed his silent, observant disposition, a family language of action without words. His paintings insist: silence accumulates into color, suppressed voice erupts as image. He paints directly from memory, without sketches or photographs. As memory distorts, contours blur, registering the pain of disappearance. Toil and Soil is cultivation of memory itself: distorted, aching, fragile. It is also cultivation of identity: a young artist shaping his own voice from silence, insisting on a worldview forged in rupture.
