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Born in Taipei in 1988, Shiwei holds both French and Taiwanese citizenships. Since the age of three, she has been living in between Taiwan, France, and the United States. She started Fine Art studies at the Sorbonne University, and at the Ateliers de la Mairie de Paris, then attended the London College of Communication, where she started a “Design for Interaction and Moving Image” BA. She then deepened her knowledge of Chinese language and culture at her birth place. She works in multiple media, including photography, video, performance, drawing, painting, blending ancestral techniques with emerging technologies.

“Art as a portal”

Shiwei is above all an autodidact. Influenced by the freedom of creativity granted by her teachers at the Ateliers de la Mairie de Paris, she developed her own understanding on arts. It appeared to her that suggestion allows the public to think, while provocation aims at telling them what to think. She aspires to push boundaries and transgress the conventions within the art world. Close to the Sensualist philosophy, she creates new visual contexts in order to give us access to emotions and knowledge. Although Shiwei fluently speaks three languages, including two of the most spoken in the world, she considers art as the best mean of communication. It is, according to her, more instinctive and primitive than language, since it provides emotional experiences and aesthetic feeling, which lead to a respectful and true dialogue with the public – a crowd whom she wishes to be as heterogeneous as possible.
Given that globalization can complicate the perception of the others by making them virtually more accessible, Shiwei tries to see through superficial differences. She tends to reunite flesh and soul, mind and body, by creating coherence between diversity and common nature of the human being, like in her series of photographs “ Dream of Birth”. She also evokes the animality and adaptability of mankind in “Hybrid Instinct”. Her performances reveal to the viewer the sanctity of human body, while advertising too often desecrates it. To her, performing is also a way of communicating, sharing feelings with the public, as well as with the world, and of inviting us all to follow the same path. She questions the wide-spread notions of cultural diversity and uniqueness, especially used in the marketing and political fields.

Christine BUSSET

(Master 2 « muséologie et communication interculturelle », Paris IV la Sorbonne)

Translated by Christine BUSSET and Sylvie BARBIER