Tien Wen

Tien Wen is a contemporary artist from Taiwan whose work revolves around sculpture and ceramics.

With an early fascination for Chinese porcelains, the colours, the enamel, the celadons, Tien Wen naturally focused her work on pottery at the end of the 90s. The passion for shapes and the substance itself gradually led the artist, as the years passed, to drop the functional side and produce more abstract pieces. Tien Wen will sometimes even close up the top of her pottery,  The artist just follows her intuition and creates pieces according to the lines that come to her mind which give her a clear vision of the final product, searching for the purist of shapes.

Tien Wen uses and combines several techniques in the production of her works of art. Certain pieces, or certain parts of the piece conserve the light tint of the enamel, while others almost take on the look of bronze thanks to the raku technique. Tien Wen has perfected this traditional Japanese technique which dates back five centuries. The principle behind raku yaki (raku ware) resides in the firing process : straight out of the oven the pieces are exposed to wood shavings or straw in enclosed containers provoking a smoking stage. This is what gives the lovely metallic or iridescent finishes to the pottery.

Born in 1963 in Taipei, Tien Wen grew up in traditional Chinese culture, her father an academic and opera buff and her mother an arts professor.  After finishing the Academy of Fine Arts in her home town she dabbled with theatre and contemporary dance before leaving Taiwan for the South of France at the end of the 1980s. Tien Wen has since been totally focused on sculpture and ceramics. Today her work is regularly exposed in galleries and on occasions art fairs in Paris, the south of France as well as in Asia.