Mind Set Art Center is delighted to announce the launch of a new artistic initiative, “MSAC Art Salon”, at our Project Room this October. The new event is inspired by the spirit of cultural patronage, sharing, and exchange from 17th and 18th-century European salons, while also embracing the avant-garde exhibition ethos of late 19th to early 20th-century French independent and autumn salons. The MSAC Art Salon aims to provide emerging artists with a platform for visibility. Additionally, it invites those new to art collecting or simply curious about the field to embark on their personal collecting journey, offering a deeper understanding of art, patronage culture, and the market through an accessible and engaging channel.
The first-ever MSAC Art Salon event will launch in the gallery’s Project Room and features works priced under $3,500, making them accessible to newcomers. The event will incorporate salon-style lectures, discussions, and dialogues, including talks by gallery founder and director Andre Lee on topics such as the appreciation of contemporary art, collecting, and market insights, as well as sessions with art researchers, collectors, and artists addressing themes related to the exhibitions. The goal is to provide novice collectors with objective knowledge and information, and to nurture the cultural ecosystem for contemporary art collecting. Moving forward, the MSAC Art Salon will be held biannually each spring and autumn. The Spring Salon will feature emerging artists invited by the gallery, while the Autumn Salon will occupy the entire exhibition space. Half of the space will display works from invited artists, with the other half dedicated for works submitted by applicants and curated by professionals from artistic, academic, collecting, and patronage backgrounds.
The inaugural MSAC Art Salon 2025 will run from October 4 to November 22, 2025, featuring six emerging artists born after 1995: Chou Kai-Lun (b. 1996), Hung Sheng-Hsiung (b. 1998), Kao Rui-Ting (b. 2001) , Pan Chi-Fang (b. 1995), Peng Wei (b. 1997), and Wang Hsiang (b. 1998). Their works span multiple mediums, including oil painting, ink brush painting, sketching, sculpture, and mixed media, exploring themes such as landscape, live sketching, abstraction, and portraiture. Despite their different starting points and inspirations, such as daily drawing, live sketching and videography, these young artists all grew up in the internet age, surrounded by flourishing digital technologies. The shared background and experiences have fostered in them a distinct visual system, one filled with abstract visual language and a similarly evocative poetic sensibility.
Wang Hsiang and Peng Wei display their portrayal of nature through paintings, sketches and ink brush paintings as their ways of conveying their different experiences during the act of creation. Wang Hsiang translates his encounters with river valleys and landscapes using brushes, pens, and pencils across varied paper and canvas surfaces, merging Eastern and Western pictorial traditions within a timeless literati sensibility. Meanwhile, Peng Wei’s pencil sketches along the Touqian River in Zhubei City capture a landscape memory weathered by the passage of time. Despite also grounded in reality, the works of Chou Kai-Lun and Pan Chi-Fang are deeply marked by the residue of photographic memory. Their oil paintings, composed with micro-perspectives and expressive short strokes, evoke the atmospheric texture of the image-saturated contemporary era. Hung Sheng-Hsiung and Kao Rui-Ting, both still graduate students at the Taiwan University of Arts, approach the existential relationship between abstract language and humans through their respective mediums: sculpture and painting. Hung’s “Stacking Shells” series, developed from the daily act of cracking eggshells, interweaves performance, sculpture, and form to reflect on human presence and emotions. Kao’s works on paper blend memory, imagination, and surrealism, exploring themes such as home and environment through evolving relationships between figures and trees.