a vessel built of echoes,
swallowing the world’s fevered hymns
to exhale them as ghostless smoke.
The Artist is a temple of flesh and thought,
a chalice drinking deep the world’s chaos,
yet ever-spilling, ever-scouring its own walls.
A porous monolith,
swallowing the storm whole,
only to sweat it out as sacrament.
A sieve of stars,
a wound that heals as it bleeds.
A throat choked with light,
yet singing the dark to sleep.
陳品陶 Chen Pin Tao, 2025
Australian-Chinese artist Chen Pin Tao channels the raw, pulsating essence of human anguish and ecstasy into evocatively lyrical paintings, sculptures, poetry, photography, and architecture.
Working fluidly across abstraction and figuration, through digital and analog means, Chen draws from both Eastern and Western art histories while collapsing those dichotomies in the process. His vivid, sensual—sometimes macabre works summons a gesamtkunstwerk he defines as Sino Gothic (中華哥德) : a staging of human dramaturgy that conjures Chineseness from the ashes of modernity, and awakens the archaic dynamics of opulence and barbarity to forge a living continuity of traditional poetics and material culture.
Descended from a distinguished lineage of violin luthiers and virtuosos with roots in Shanghai, Chen was classically trained as a violinist in his formative years. This inheritance of meticulous craft and musical sensibilities tempered by both visceral emotion and architectural precision—continues to echo through his polymathic artistic practice.