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 joy and anguish, sufferings and pleasures into evocatively lyrical paintings, sculptures, and poetry. A descendant of a venerable lineage of violin luthiers and music virtuosos, Chen was a classically trained violinist in his nascent years, and has since evolved into a polymathic creator— working fluidly across the traditions of abstraction and figuration, organicity and techne, with influences from both Eastern and Western art history, all the while collapsing those dichotomies in the process. His works are
crystallizations synthesizing the fleeting, impermanent human experience of pain and ecstasy, will to sovereignty and power, and everything in between,
immortalizing these ephemeral sensations and eternal truths as vivid artifacts with a yearning for a romanticism that is deeply sensual, and sometimes
macabre
— summoning an aesthetic that he defines as “Chinese Gothic” and “Post-Reverse-Chinoiserie“ as a gesture of cultural reclamation through an aesthetic negotiation with the fanged labyrinthine of colonial and geopolitical reality.
As machines eclipse flesh and render existence optional, Chen’s practice becomes a defiant archaeology of the soul: a fevered excavation for the neurotic, erotic, violent, ecstatic tremor of being—the bleeding, illogical excess no algorithm can taste or replicate. Here, art’s ancient mission—to salvage what vanishes—mutates into the superfluous pulse of feeling. If art has always grieved what is lost, and technology’s displacement of the human is inevitable, his work seeks a transcendent visual rupture: forging a visual language that is excessively and stubbornly unoptimizable.
As machines eclipse flesh and render existence optional, Chen’s practice becomes a defiant archaeology of the soul: a fevered excavation for the neurotic, erotic, violent, ecstatic tremor of being—the bleeding, illogical excess no algorithm can taste or replicate. Here, art’s ancient mission—to salvage what vanishes—mutates into the superfluous pulse of feeling. If art has always grieved what is lost, and technology’s displacement of the human is inevitable, his work seeks a transcendent visual rupture: forging a visual language that is excessively and stubbornly unoptimizable.