National Formosa University (NFU) is presenting a solo exhibition by fiber artist Chen-Ling Lee titled “In the Weave of Mountains and Waters: A Journey from Paradise to Everyday Life”, with the opening event held on June 4. Drawing upon the artist’s personal experiences and memories of landscapes, the exhibition extends into reflections on cultural imagination and everyday perception. Using weaving as both method and medium, the exhibition invites viewers to enter a contemporary landscape where nature, memory, and technology intersect.
Chen-Ling Lee has long been dedicated to fiber art and is particularly interested in exploring the transformative potential of textile materials within contemporary art. Her works integrate the aesthetics of traditional East Asian landscape painting, personal life experiences, and digital weaving technologies. Through the interlacing structure of warp and weft, she develops artistic expressions that exist between painting, textile art, and imagery, transforming fiber into a medium that carries memory and time.
This exhibition brings together representative works from nearly a decade of artistic practice. Beginning with the early series Variations on Landscapes, inspired by the scenery of her hometown, Hualien, the exhibition continues through later works such as Imagined Penglai and the Impermanent Immortal Mountains series. These projects explore cultural interpretations of landscape through myths of Penglai, dry landscape gardens, and traditional garden aesthetics, demonstrating how Lee uses fiber and intricate weaving techniques to guide audiences in examining the relationships among landscape, craftsmanship, and personal life experience.
Lee explained that “from paradise to everyday life” represents not only a transformation in artistic form but also a reflection of contemplation and retrospection at different stages of her life. Through the progression of works presented in this exhibition, she hopes to share the idea that people are not always able to fully understand their own circumstances in the present moment. However, over time, memories, experiences, and emotions gradually emerge and evolve into a more mature and distinctive creative language.
Among the featured works, Imagined Penglai combines East Asian landscape traditions, concepts of garden space, and imagery from the mythological Penglai paradise to construct a spiritual landscape situated between reality and ideality. In doing so, landscape is reconfigured as an expression of cultural memory and personal identity.
The Impermanent Immortal Mountains series returns to everyday experiences and states of constant change. Horse imagery is introduced as a symbol of companionship and relationships, while digitally woven jacquard structures create dotted patterns that resemble pixels. The resulting visual effect reflects the shifting nature of contemporary perception, situated between natural and digital vocabularies.
Yen-Hsi Lee, Director of the NFU Art Center, noted that compared with more conventional exhibitions featuring painting, oil painting, or ceramics, this exhibition is distinctive in its use of fiber textiles to express landscape imagery. Both the medium and the artistic approach are highly unique, which led the Art Center to invite Chen-Ling Lee to exhibit her work on campus. In addition, the artist will conduct workshops that allow students to move beyond observation and engage directly in creative experiences, further enhancing artistic appreciation and aesthetic education.
The exhibition is open from now until June 30 and is being held in the Exhibition Hall on the first floor of the Comprehensive Building III at NFU’s Second Campus. Faculty members, students, and members of the public are warmly invited to immerse themselves in these woven works and rediscover how landscapes are created, transformed, and perceived within a contemporary context.
Article provided by: Art Center
