SHIH Yung Chun

SHIH Yung Chun’s practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and text, centering on the exploration of private experiences of daily life and human behavior. Growing up in a village near a military base during Taiwan’s period of economic revitalization, SHIH Yung Chun developed a deep sensitivity to the transient value of things quickly discarded and replaced amid rapid societal changes. His practice often begins with imagery drawn from 1980s product packaging, newspapers, and magazines—materials that recall the decade of his childhood. The toys that frequently appear in his recent works not only evoke his personal memories but also bear subtle traces of the times and places from which they originated. By intertwining these traces into intricate networks of relationships, SHIH endlessly expands the narrative universe of his practice.

SHIH began incorporating toys into his artistic practice in 2015, initially arranging them within specific scenes depicted in his paintings. In his subsequent Toy Packaging series (2022–), he shifted toward compressing and re-packaging imagined scenes inside vinyl or boxed packages. Through this transformation, the collected toys not only assumed a more active role in shaping the narrative, but also acquired a paradoxical quality that alludes to their mass-produced, commodified nature. SHIH’s Toy Set (2025-) series consists of three-dimensional works reminiscent of puppet-theater stages, presented mostly in tabletop-sized dioramas. Each stage is constructed from vintage product packaging, dolls, toys, and modeling clay for children, materials that evoke the artist’s own childhood. The distinct stages depict different settings, from which scenes are excerpted and re-created in a series of paintings and a video work, revealing the interconnections among the various pieces. By placing articulated dolls within miniature, three-dimensional stages, SHIH reconfigures the grand narratives of sociocultural reality within his own microcosmic universe. These puppet-theater sets are later reimagined as propaganda-style paintings and time-based cinematic animations. Through this process, the static past is revived as a dynamic and fictionalized history. Rather than presenting a single, linear storyline, SHIH invites viewers to interpret his works from multiple perspectives, encouraging layered reflections on their underlying themes.

SHIH was born in 1978 in Taiwan and received his BFA in Western Painting from the National Taiwan University of Arts in 2003. He has held numerous solo exhibitions across China, Taiwan, and Korea, and has participated in group exhibitions held in notable institutions including White Rabbit Gallery (Sydney, Australia, 2025; 2024), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne, Australia, 2024), Taitung Art Museum (Taitung, Taiwan, 2023), Long Museum West Bund (Shanghai, China, 2022), New Taipei City Art Center (New Taipei, Taiwan, 2020), and Today Art Museum (Beijing, China, 2012), among others. He received the Taikai Prize at Geisai Taiwan #3 (2011) and Geisai Taiwan #1 (2009). His works are included in the collections of the White Rabbit Collection (Australia), Long Museum (China), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), National Museum of Taiwan History (Taiwan), Art Bank Taiwan (Taiwan), and ARARIO Collection (Korea).