Chien Chung-Wei was born in 1968 and earned a master’s degree in Fine Arts, from National Taiwan Normal University. Over the years, he has won many awards in international competitions. In addition, he is the first artist in Taiwan to become a signature member of and Dolphin Fellowship of the American Watercolor Society. He now teaches watercolor in Taiwan and has been invited to instruct watercolor workshops worldwide.
The watercolor works of Chien Chung-Wei appear to embrace the spirits and temperament of the Western watercolor masters over the last two centuries. By age 32, his works tended to be delicate and classic and were reminiscent of the works of William Henry Hunt and Myles Birket Foster. After that, he gradually focused on the expression of the essence of watercolors. “I do not care much about what the subjects are in reality or photographs, I just strive to discover, strengthen, abandon, and beautify the intrigue of the forms I have observed.” Says Chien
“If we compare the various medium characteristics of watercolors to the different actors in a play, then the pictorial composition would be the script of the play.” Says Chien.
You can see the spirits of some great watercolor masters, such as Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, J.M.W. Turner, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sergent, and Edward Seago, in his works. In the meantime, he also broke the boundary between watercolors and oil paints. He created a series of works using watercolors and gouache and looked like the Romantic oil paintings of the 19th century.
Those works totally changed the conventional impression of watercolors. His works are temperant and classic in colors with masterful brushstrokes, which endow every character with a rich fullness. He creates the beauty and intrigue of form even with ordinary subjects, and that’s the enchantment of his watercolors. In the trend of contemporary art, Chien Chung-Wei enjoys popularity in recent years. This seems to let us reconsider the pictorial value of the classic spirit in painting.
