Weiwei Chu Taipei, b. 1997

b. 1997 in Taipei, Taiwan
Lives and works in Paris, France

 

Her painting practice begins with encounters whose significance is not immediately apparent: recurring numbers, overheard phrases, objects, conversations, or coincidences that momentarily disturb the ordinary. Often recorded first as short sentences or provisional titles, these fragments form an expanding archive from which paintings may or may not emerge. Rather than treating coincidence as a subject in itself, her work considers how unrelated elements acquire associations through proximity, repetition, and displacement.

 

Moving between language and image, she approaches these fragments as points of departure rather than subjects to be represented. A painting may begin with a handful of words, a remembered object, or a loosely formed image, while their original references gradually become less legible through the process of making. Working with oil, acrylic, pencil, ink, animal glue, and mineral pigments, she brings together materials associated with different painting traditions, she allows differences in opacity, absorption, drying, and layering to intervene in the development of an image. Chance operates here alongside selection: forms may emerge unexpectedly from accumulated marks and material interactions, but it is through acts of recognition and decision that they become part of the painting.

 

She is interested in what happens when a painting moves between figuration and abstraction without settling entirely into either, allowing what appears within them to remain unstable. Faces, eyes, landscapes, numbers, or organic forms may appear without functioning as stable signs or narratives. An image recognized by the artist can be read otherwise by another viewer, shifting again through associations that exceed those from which the work began. Meaning is not fixed in advance, but continually reorganized through making and looking.

 

Material experimentation plays an important role in her painting process. She often combines several mediums and sometimes prepares her own pigments, adjusting the proportions of powder, water, glue, or oil to change how a material behaves. Paintings are built through successive thin layers, allowing differences in absorption, transparency, drying, and accumulation to affect the image. She also works with fast-drying mixtures and airbrush, using speed to bring the act of painting closer to intuition. Her painting happens within this uncertainty—between control and letting go, intention and emergence. Forms are never completely decided, and what becomes visible always carries something that remains absent.

 

Her recent solo and duo exhibitions include Wei-Wei CHU & Louis Lanne, Galerie Jean-Collet (Paris, 2025); A–Z, Galerie Namima (Nancy, 2023); and I’m Your Windshield, Error 22 Mole (Tainan, 2022). Selected group exhibitions include CICA Museum (South Korea, 2025), Galerie Municipale Jean-Collet (Paris, 2024).

 

In 2024, she received the First Prize in Painting at the 56th Novembre à Vitry, and in 2025 she participated in the SKOPART residency at the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts in Greece. She holds an MFA with honors from ENSAD Nancy in 2023 and a Master’s degree in Art Therapy from Université Paris Cité in 2025.