Mind Set Art Center is delighted to present, in the midsummer of 2025, the works of young artist Yen Yu-Heng in a Project Room exhibition titled "Through the Veil of Light ". The show is set to feature fifteen of new works created over the past six months that explore optical effects of overexposure and defocus in photography. By capturing these unusual optical characteristics with his paint brush, the artist reinterprets familiar everyday scenes from a fresh perspective through the transition between two different mediums. Yen is currently pursuing his MFA at the National Taiwan University of Arts. His works emit a poetic blend of tranquility, warmth, subtlety and nostalgia, fascinating both the viewer’s mind and emotions. The exhibition is scheduled to run from August 16 through September 20, with a reception set at 5:00 on open day to which we cordially invite your presence.
Born in 2001, Yen Yu-Heng's youth is shaped by the digital technology and internet landscape of the 21st century. Yet unlike many of his peers who embrace virtual worlds and trend-driven art, this 24-year-old artist has developed a fascination with the analog visual language of 20th-century photography and black-and-white cinema. This unexpected affinity explains the inspiration of his work, as reflected in his artist statement, “It all began with when I accidentally shot an overexposed, out-of-focus photograph through glass with a film camera. It made me contemplate the meaning of this accident, because the photo, with its flaws, would be considered a failure by conventional standards. It was precisely the abnormal visual characteristics that fascinated me, inspiring me to depart from my previous works that focused on expressing the immediate emotions in the moment of observation, and to enter this current phase where I begin to explore ways of expressing these accidents visually, to make my paintings appear unfamiliar and exotic, to interpret everyday scenes from new perspectives.”
The exhibited work “Under the Bridge” captures summer's sweltering heat through refractive light. Inside the frame, the artist applies simplified geometric forms, a near-monochromatic color palette, as well as minute brushstrokes and fine tonal shifts to create a subtle and tranquil atmosphere that emanates human warmth and warmth and radiance. It is as if the painting is evoking blurred moments from a memory or an indelible mental image. In contrast to this sun-drenched scene in the aforementioned work, “Follow the Light” depicts a scene in which faint light is scattered through speed woods, conjuring a misty yet divine poetry that emits the nostalgic warmth of classic black-and-white cinema. Tree trunks, foliage, and meadows dissolve into greyish luminescence, composing a moving visual adagio. In “U-Shape”, the artist implements symbolic techniques to fuse the crown-shaped vines with light, mixing in faint green radiance in the pale grey shades that refracts the artist’s delicate sentiments and thoughts.
