"Geopoetry - Naxos (Greek chamomile)" Artwork

Cheng-Yen Yu’s practice spans painting, installation, and the use of found objects, grounded in the methodology of pintura matèrica (material painting). At its core lies an inquiry into the nature of materials—their primordial states, embedded histories, and latent narrative potential.

He combines watercolor, acrylic, and mixed media with elements such as calcium carbonate, soil, sand, clay, minerals, fossils, mother-of-pearl, as well as architectural and natural materials. Through processes of mixing, sedimentation, cracking, and layering, he generates highly tensioned textures and a tactile visual language in which traces of time gradually emerge.

For Yu, materials possess intrinsic physical conditions while also being continually re-signified across different cultural contexts. They function not only as formal elements but also as carriers of his experiences shaped by postcolonial conditions and displacement. In the series Spiritual Fossils and Dust that Never Settles, his work explores the fluidity of identity across cultural contexts and the liminality of geography. Formed through his ongoing experiences of migration and reconstruction, his visual language oscillates between intimacy and estrangement, producing a dynamic perceptual structure.

In relation to the external world, Yu pays close attention to the cultural contexts of local materials. In the series Geopoetry, the selection and transformation of materials respond to the historical and material conditions of specific sites. This approach develops a site-responsive methodology that interweaves regional histories with personal experience.

He regards his practice as an operative “archaeological process,” in which the decomposition, fusion, and reconfiguration of materials reveal their internal historical strata. Through this process, he excavates both personal and collective experiences, bringing into visibility the relationship between material and memory, while seeking to locate himself within an ever-shifting world.