Ed Pien

Ed Pien was born in Taipei, Taiwan and moved to Canada when he was 11 years old. He received his Master of Fine Arts from York University in 1984. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, in venues that include The Drawing Centre, New York; La Biennale de Montréal; W139, Amsterdam;
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; and the Goethe Institute, Berlin. His work is in the collections of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporaneo, Costa Rica, Museum London, the Weatherspoon Art Museum and University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.

Pien draws on sources both Eastern and Western to create his work, including Asian ghost stories, hell scrolls, calligraphic traditions and the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, creating sensual, drawing-based installations using ink and translucent paper (like Earthly Delights in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). The spectator is invited to walk into these floor-to-ceiling environments and approach the half-human, half-animal monsters within. In his most recent body of work, Pien has replaced ink and gouache with an xacto knife in order to produce large-scale paper cuts. In the summer of 2004, he travelled to China to continue research on myths and legends found in Chinese folklore; he returned from the trip excited about a form of art that is centuries old in its tradition...

from http://www.pfoac.com/artists/EP_EN.htm