Fuchiawen
Lien
Media:
Mixed Media, Painting
Studio Location:
Wills Building 3, 43-50,11 Street, Long Island City, NY 11101
Room/Studio#
209
Website:
Artist Bio:
Born and educated in Taipei, Taiwan, Fu C.W. Lien is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and writer whose work bridges studio practice, art history, and feminist discourse. After earning her B.A. and MFA in the University of North Carolina-Greensboro United States, she returned to Taiwan in the 1980s, where she served as an assistant researcher at The Taipei Fine Arts Museum and later as an assistant professor at Ming Chuan University and Tamkang University. In 1992, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue her Ph.D. in Art History at the City University of New York (CUNY Graduate Center), specializing in contemporary feminist art. In 2004, she completed her dissertation "The Body Politics of Decoration and Handicraft: Re-Visioning 1970s Feminist Art."
Deeply engaged in feminist art, Lien was involved with Awakening, a pioneering feminist organization in Taipei, and played a key role in founding Space II, Taiwan’s first artist cooperative gallery. Her artistic practice intertwines with her scholarly work, creating a dynamic exchange between theory and artistic experimentation—whether through painting, collage, or assemblage.
Lien has exhibited in both Taiwan and the U.S., including solo shows in Space II (Taipei, Taiwan), Art Studio (Beaumont, TX) and group exhibitions at Blue Mountain Gallery (Chelsea, NYC) and the Queens Museum (NYC). Her work reflects a lifelong commitment to exploring identity, memory, and the intersections of personal and feminist politics.
Artist Statement:
From Collage to Bricolage
I started to do collage after I had a child more than 3 decades ago. Life became fragmented, chaotic—time was no longer linear but pieced together in fleeting moments.
I was thrilled to find a new opportunity to transform discarded material into art. It was a total liberation for me to move away from my training in early modernist painting. I discovered a new language—one that allowed me to use my fragmented time to endorse the memories and meanings embedded in everyday objects.
Now, my work evolves into “bricolage” (the term inspired by Lévi-Strauss and Griselda Pollock). I collaborate with found artworks, vintage posters, and kitsch, letting their "ghost images" guide me. The process is a dialogue, embracing chance and layered meaning.
As a feminist art historian and artist, I am drawn to craft, decoration, and women’s issues including collaboration, question of greatness, gender dynamics, domestic labors, details—themes central to 1970s feminist art. Bricolage embodies making-do, resisting hierarchies between high/low, past/present, and intention/accident. It’s a space of freedom: to disrupt, reclaim, and reconstruct how we assign value.
