Fluttering Stillness - Taaye
Centre A is pleased to present the culminating exhibition of Vancouver-based artist Taaye, developed during her residency at the gallery from January 17 to February 28, 2026. During this period, Taaye created a new body of work exploring Chinese and Cantonese proverbs as forms of cultural inheritance shaped by migration, displacement, and diasporic estrangement. Drawing from a proverb that evokes scattering in the aftermath of upheaval, the project considers how inherited language can function both as a framework for understanding the world and as a source of distance within diasporic life. Central to the work is Taaye’s use of East Asian mineral pigments (岩絵具 iwa-enogu / 岩彩 yán cǎi), ground minerals mixed with handmade binders, whose slow and labor-intensive process resists immediacy and demands sustained bodily engagement. Through layered material processes and linguistic reflection, the exhibition meditates on the shifting meanings of cultural inheritance across geographies and generations.
On view from March 4–21, 2026, the exhibition of new works by Taaye is accompanied by a curatorial essay by Li Lin.
Exhibition Duration: March 4–21, 2026
Location: #205-268 Keefer St. (2nd floor of the Sun Wah Centre)
Gallery Hours: Wed–Sat, 12–6 PM
Artist Bio:
Taaye (b. Hong Kong; based in Vancouver) is an artist working with East Asian mineral pigments (岩絵具 iwaenogu; 岩彩 yán cǎi) as a materially and culturally grounded practice. She previously worked as a corporate designer before transitioning into a full-time fine art practice. Taaye holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has lived in Hong Kong, Canada, and the United States, with shorter periods in Italy and Japan.
Her practice has been supported by major funding bodies, including the Canada Council for the Arts (2024, 2025), the BC Arts Council (2025), and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Emerging Artist Grant (2025). She has upcoming residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Centre A. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including group exhibitions at the Centre of International Contemporary Art (CICA), Vancouver, and Art Next Expo, Hong Kong.
Taaye deepened her engagement with mineral pigments through specialised training at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan (2024). Her works are held in private collections in Hong Kong, the United States, and Canada. She currently serves on the board of Access Gallery in Vancouver.
Artist Statement:
Taaye is an artist whose practice examines personal narratives through cultural memory, exploring endurance and permanence within an in-between state of displacement and belonging. Working with East Asian mineral pigments—a medium that embraces a slow, material-driven process—she bridges material knowledge with lived experience.
Her imagery draws from Cantonese and Chinese motifs, alongside folk tales and bird-like creatures. Through these elements, she reconstructs selfhood and the enduring threads that connect past, present, and future. Each work becomes a vessel for questioning what endures, what is carried forward, and what must be newly imagined.
Taaye’s practice is grounded in a sustained engagement with raw materials and traditional processes. After working with watercolor and printmaking, she ultimately committed to East Asian mineral pigments. The medium’s complex historical trajectory—from ancient China to its revival in Japan, and its recent reintegration into contemporary Chinese art practice—parallels the artist’s own cross-cultural movement. Through the texture and luminosity of raw minerals, Taaye articulates a layered mode of storytelling that reframes material, memory, and cultural continuity.
镜花水月，羽影惊鸿
Curatorial Essay Written by Lin Li
Taaye’s work is distinguished by meticulous brushwork, striking chromatic intensity, and strong thematic coherence, alongside her sustained engagement with mineral pigment painting. Her practice is fundamentally material-driven, embracing the unique textures, luminosity, and layering possibilities inherent to this medium. For Taaye, mineral painting is not merely a medium, but an integral component of her visual narrative. While selectively drawing on the historical and cultural connotations of mineral painting in East Asia, Taaye reinterprets the medium through contemporary approaches. Birds and bird-like beings recur throughout her work as symbolic figures—evoking nostalgia for her homeland, Hong Kong, reflecting on diasporic identity, and, in her most recent series, reconfiguring female roles shaped by social and cultural expectations.
Mineral pigment (yancai 岩彩 in Chinese or 岩絵具 iwa-enogu in Japanese), is a type of natural pigment with a profound history of application throughout East Asia and especially in China and Japan. Some scholars argue that in China, the use of mineral pigments in paintings can be traced back to the seventh century. Natural mineral pigments are known for their brilliant hues, high cost, and also for their intensively high toxicity especially some certain types. For instance, blue and green mineral pigments often contain basic copper carbonate, while cinnabar—a red mineral pigment—is primarily composed of mercury sulphide. Most mineral pigments lack adhesive properties, requiring the integration of a binding agent to secure the pigment to the surface. The above factors all contribute to the creation of mineral painting being an intricate, painstaking, and time-consuming process. Taaye first encountered the art of mineral painting in 2020 and began her formal study in Taiwan in 2024. The jewel-like brilliance of this unique medium, combined with the sculptural texture created by the mineral powders, imparts a distinctive visual presence to her work.
Thematically, birds have remained a consistent motif throughout Taaye’s practice, spanning from her earlier watercolours to her current mineral painting series. As visual motifs and icons, birds and wings carry complex, profound symbolic weights in art history, with the iconographical connotations shifting across various visual contexts and socio-religious frameworks. Notably, "flower-and-bird" is a quintessential subject in classical East Asian art. Its prevalence in Chinese gongbi painting, Japanese nihonga, and Korean ink wash painting has established it as an independent painting category. Traditionally, many painters—particularly those utilizing mineral pigments—emphasize the meticulous depiction of feathers, beaks, and other anatomical details as a demonstration of technical virtuosity and focus on a lifelikeness of their subject. Meanwhile, in classical Chinese and Japanese painting, the flower-and-bird as a genre are often parallelled with the "painting of beauties" (meirenhua/bijinga). While phrased for their exquisiteness, flowers, birds and female beauties were primarily framed as objects to be viewed.
In Taaye’s recent practice, the birds have moved beyond literal representation toward a greater degree of abstraction. This abstraction or obscurity does not stem from a lack of attention to detail, but rather as a cohesive atmosphere, characterized by large areas of similar tones, a composition devoid of negative space, and a deliberate blurring of anatomical precision. This pervasive sense of obscurity has evolved from her early watercolours and intensified over time. Transitioning from the 2021–22 watercolour series—which depicted cockatoos in Hong Kong—to her recent works, the subjects have shifted from depiction of certain species toward expansive wings and mythical birdlike creatures. With their deep, saturated hues, the birds in Taaye’s work are transformed into powerful visual metaphors.
The works in this exhibition are drawn from two of Taaye’s recent series: “The Condition of Life Becoming” and “Song of the Bard”. “The Condition of Life Becoming” series draws on icons from Cantonese proverbs, Hong Kong cinema, and Buddhist mythology. References include the “footless bird” from the 1990 Hong Kong film Days of Being Wild, as well as the Kalaviṅka (the Bird of Celestial Melody) and Jivajivaka (the two-headed bird), both of which are mythical avian creatures from Buddhism. By portraying the awakening of the restless “feetless bird”, the paradoxical “silence” of the Kalaviṅka—a being said to sing throughout its life, the artist opens a deeper inquiry into the existentialist idea that “existence precedes essence.”
In Taaye’s latest series, “Song of the Bard”, she employs birds and wings as metaphors to navigate the familial, social, and existential predicaments inherent to female identity. Her recent series, The Song of the Bard, is a multidisciplinary body of work comprising both paintings and poetry, with each painting titled after a young woman featured in the verses. Through delicate brushwork, Taaye weaves the visually intense imagery of the "bird in a cage," yet counters with powerful, tension-filled details—such as the distinct, vigorously beating wings in the work titled Pemae—to depict the protagonists’ resistance against their destinies.
Historically, the motif of the "bird in the cage" as a signifier has been inextricably linked to the female. The cage often reinforces a visual order of the observer versus the observed. In Western art, the bird in a cage serves as a recurring visual trope that evolved from representing virginal purity to reinforcing the values of domestic confinement and marital possession. In Taaye's work, the "cages" possess the intricate delicacy of geometric art, interspersed with vibrantly coloured wings. Rather than confinement, these structures emphasize disruption and subversion.
Taaye’s birds have undergone a profound transformation: Starting with depicting cockatoos in her childhood memories of Hong Kong and have evolved into the legendary, story-driven birdlike creatures of her recent works. Throughout her journey so far, the growing detail and texture on her canvases offer the audience increasing room to explore and imagine. Acting as symbols of the inner self, the feathers and wings on Taaye’s canvas lead us past their brilliant surfaces to a deeper meditation on the fragility of life. Under the intricate details of their plumage is a story of endurance, tracing the journey from a restless existence to a powerful moment of self-awakening.
Photo Documentation by Dennis Ha