Tommy CHEN (Chen, Tao-Ming 陳道明) was born in Jinan, China, in 1931. At eighteen he left home to study at Taipei Teachers College, where he learned modern painting from LI Chung-Sheng, whose students later formed the Ton-Fan Art Group. As a founding member, CHEN remains an important contributor to Taiwan's postwar modernist painting movement and was the first of his generation to commit to abstract art.
CHEN's painting documents the travels of his mind. His non-representational records grow from an intimate dialogue with material; points, lines, and texture allow the work to move beyond symbols. By experimenting with different media, he expands the textures and conversations available to the painting, approaching abstraction with as little interference and conclusiveness as possible.
Ten years of training in traditional Chinese art and aesthetics gave CHEN a foundation for developing his own language. His work holds Chinese and Western pictorial strategies in tension, harmonized through the element of time in his methods and treatment of the medium.