Image: Taipei Fine Arts Museum
‘Wang Ya-Hui: Traveler’, a retrospective jointly curated by Lei Yi-Ting and Lin Hsuan-Chun, will open on 12 September 2026 on the second floor of Taipei Fine Arts Museum. The exhibition runs through 3 January 2027 and brings together selected works made between 2002 and 2022, including video installations, kinetic sculptures and photographs. Previously unpublished works and drawing manuscripts will also be on view.
The exhibition takes its title from Wang Ya-Hui’s 2019 video installation ‘Traveler’. Its name derives from an unmanned space probe launched by NASA in 1977 under the same name. The probe left the solar system and entered interstellar space in 2012, and remains in operation. Wang’s work describes states of human time in different spaces.
Wang Ya-Hui (1973–2023) was born in Taipei. She graduated from the Western Painting division of the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University in 1998, and from the Graduate Institute of Arts and Technology at Taipei National University of the Arts in 2004. In 2002, she received the Taipei Arts Award for ‘Falling’, and in 2005 she received the Yageo Tech Art Award.
Wang participated in the Taipei Biennial with ‘Gap’ in 2002, ‘Artist Cinema—The Dark Side’ in 2010, and ‘Visitor’ in 2023. Her practice drew on close observations of living spaces and daily experience, using new media, electronic and digital equipment, low-tech techniques, and handmade props. Her works engage the frameworks of abstraction and figuration, material and immaterial, three-dimensional and two-dimensional, reality and illusion, and space and time.
The exhibition information also identifies Wang’s interest in film, photography, music and literature. She connected Western and Japanese classics, as well as understandings of Chinese painting and calligraphy, to her consideration of possibilities for image space.
Among the selected works is ‘Still Life in the Sun’ (2005), a video installation with a duration of four minutes and 36 seconds. The work is held in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum collection. ‘Leaf Hole’ (2011), also in the collection, consists of inkjet prints on semi-gloss photographic paper, listed at 37.5 by 50 centimetres (×6).
‘Questioning Shadows #2’ (2017) is an inkjet print on art paper mounted on aluminium, measuring 120 by 120 centimetres. ‘Notebook’ (2020) combines a single-channel, colour, silent video and drawing paper, with a running time of nine minutes and one second. Both works are in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum collection.
Also included is ‘Chessboard’ (2020), made with stained wood panels, clock movements, black acrylic and ink. The work is listed with dimensions of 49 by 49 by 4.5 centimetres and 43 by 43 by 4.8 centimetres, and is held in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum collection.
