Ed Pien: Haven of Delight

Audio Artist Feature: http://www.mendel.ca/wordpress/?p=675 Ed Pien is one of Canada’s best-known contemporary artists. For over twenty-five years, Pien has succeeded in creating his own unique, phantasmagorical visual language of tales and myths and half-human and half-animal figures, plunging the viewer into worlds which spark the imagination. Ed Pien: Haven of Delight features the artist’s drawings, installations and paper cutouts, the latter inspired by the traditional Chinese art of paper cuts. In addition to large cut-paper frescoes, the exhibition features the first Canadian showing of Haven, a work that was created for the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington State. This imposing installation includes five interlocking paper structures that form a labyrinthine space bounded by jagged hedges, into which visitors are invited to venture. Inside the structures, sound and video elements intermingle with paper vines from which various peculiar figures emerge. Ed Pien: Haven of Delight is curated by Eve-Lyne Beaudry. The exhibition is organized and circulated by the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec. Ed Pien was born in Taiwan in 1958 and has lived in Canada since 1969. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario, and a Master’s of Fine Arts from York University. He has exhibited in Canada, China, France, Germany, Mexico, and the United States.