What kind of world do the images on our screens create, and how does art respond to the changes they bring to our everyday lives? Since its founding in 2004, Chi-Wen Gallery has championed contemporary Taiwanese art through a sustained focus on video art. Today, the gallery is once again asking what a gallery can be.
As AI and new technologies rapidly reshape our world, Chi-Wen Gallery is moving beyond the boundaries of a fixed space, expanding its activities through collaboration with artists, collectors, and fellow galleries. At Tokyo Gendai, the gallery joins forces with two other galleries in a collaborative presentation that explores the desires and systems embedded in contemporary society through play, fantasy, and performance. Discover the new landscapes opened up by Taiwanese video art—and experience them in person at the fair.
Could you tell us about the history of Chi-Wen Gallery and the vision that has guided the gallery since its founding?
After twenty years, the gallery continues to focus on video art. In light of rapid advances in artificial general intelligence (AGI), I felt it was time to rethink the gallery’s role: to understand it as a living, flexible organisation—a new “operating system” suited to the needs of the present. Rather than maintaining a conventional white-cube space, I am exploring a mobile approach that I have been developing since 2025. At the centre of this shift is the idea of Emergence (湧現): an inner creative force that informs and sustains my work with artists and collaborators.
This direction builds on our work through Chi-Wen Productions during the pandemic in 2020. We supported an emerging artist in presenting a live performance and producing a 30-minute video work, which has since entered the collections of Tate and M+. Since then, we have continued to support Taiwanese and international artists, including those not formally represented by the gallery.
We are also building a video-art collection through collaborations with other galleries and their artists. For instance, we have acquired works by mid-career artists including Su Hui-Yu, Chang Li-Ren, Tsui Kuang-Yu, and Yu Cheng-Ta. This commitment to collaboration was one reason we welcomed the opportunity to participate in Tokyo Gendai alongside two other galleries.
Chi-Wen Gallery has long championed video art and new media. How have you seen collectors’ interest in these practices evolve over the years?
Collectors today play a more active role in video art and new media. Beyond acquiring works, they can help enable their production, circulation, and placement in museums and other institutions. I see collectors, gallerists, and artists as a close-knit triangle that sustains the art world; at Tane at Tokyo Gendai, I aim to bring these three roles into direct conversation.
To further support the gallery and its artists, I collaborate with MOV Collection, founded by a video-art collector, on projects intended for institutional collections. In this model, collectors do more than acquire art: they help create the conditions for its production, exhibition, and long-term public life. The gallery, in turn, makes collecting a more active form of participation and stewardship.
What do you hope visitors will take away after experiencing your booth at Tokyo Gendai?
At Tane, Tokyo Gendai, we are presenting a triangular video installation with Double Square Gallery and Project Fulfill Art Space, bringing together works by Yu Cheng-Ta’s alter ego FAMEME, Tsui Kuang-Yu, and Zhang Xu Zhan. Although their visual languages are very different, all three artists use play, performance, and fantasy to reveal the systems that shape our desires and behaviour.
FAMEME’s Fancy Fantasy! (2024) turns Tokyo’s Kabukichō nightlife, queer desire, and pop-media culture into an immersive world in which art and commercial entertainment become difficult to separate.
In Exercise Living: A Seer (2018), Tsui Kuang-Yu uses subtle and absurd actions in everyday urban settings to expose the social scripts, consumerist habits, and media-driven “prophecies” that organise contemporary life.
Zhang Xu Zhan’s Animal Story AT5 transforms Taiwanese funeral-paper craft and a travelling folktale into a surreal stop-motion fable, where life, death, ritual, and cultural adaptation coexist.
Together, the works create a dreamlike but uneasy environment. They invite viewers to consider how identity, desire, belief, and even imagination are performed, mediated, and constantly reshaped in the world we inhabit.
Thank you very much! We look forward to seeing your work in September.
From experiencing art to shaping its future.
Discover Chi-Wen Gallery at Tokyo Gendai.
Dates:
11-13 September 2026 (Fri-Sun) *Vernissage: 10 September (Thu)
Venue:
Pacifico Yokohama
Booth:
Chi-Wen Gallery
Ticket Purchase:
Chi-We Gallery
Founded in 2004 in Taipei, Chi-Wen Gallery specializes in film and video and champions contemporary Taiwanese art. The gallery supports the production and distribution of video art and new-media work while exploring critical questions raised by emerging technologies.
