Mind Set Art Center is honored to present Feminine Space, a group exhibition on view from October 17 to November 21, 2026, with an opening reception on October 17 at 4:30 p.m. The exhibition brings together eight women artists from Taiwan, the Philippines, and Romania: Chia-Yi CHEN, CHEN Yin Ling, Marina Cruz, Patricia Perez Eustaquio, LO Yi-Chun, Andreea Medar, Ana Maria Micu, and Juin SHIEH. An artist talk will also be held during the exhibition on November 14, featuring Chia-Yi CHEN, CHEN Yin Ling, and Juin SHIE in conversation about their respective artistic practice.
Drawing on the notion of Chora, a feminine matrix associated with interiority, memory, and bodily perception, Feminine Space turns toward physical acts of making and the creation of spaces for inward dwelling. Through the intertwined ideas of the mending of time and material archaeology, the exhibition considers how women artists respond to anxiety, fractured realities, and fading memories through acts of material repair, while sustaining a deeper inquiry into existence and the inner life. Here, space is understood not as an empty framework, but as a tangible and perceptual field shaped by aged timber bearing historical traces, discarded objects, worn textiles, skins and fibres derived from cash crops, and synthetic plastics. Through carving, hand stitching, digital weaving, the manipulation of light and shadow, and attentive observation of everyday plants, the artists transform slow and repetitive handwork into protective forms against the clamor of the outside world. Each encounter between hand and material becomes a way of working through family memory, bodily wounds, unresolved histories, and the pressures of everyday life.
Objects marked by history and use become points of departure for material archaeology and the repair of intimate relationships. Chia-Yi CHEN, whose practice has long explored the interdependence of people, environments, and matter, presents Exist I and Exist II, lightbox installations reconstructed from ox-eye windows dating from the Japanese colonial period. Reframing damaged architectural remnants as luminous, shifting structures, Chen reactivates fragments of urban memory through bodily perception. In her new work Red Thread, CHEN Yin Ling places a blindfolded portrait in dialogue with moving projected imagery. Evoking both the umbilical cord and the circulation of blood, the red thread becomes an invisible bond through which maternal anxiety and an embodied bond that exceeds sight are brought into focus. Filipino artist Marina Cruz draws on memories of flooding at her family’s ancestral home and on garments passed down through generations. In The Yellow, Black and White, she depicts zippers, seams, and folds of fabric with meticulous, close-up realism. Elevated Potted Plant focuses on a ceramic pot and plant in the family courtyard, bringingtogether flood-weathered walls, the passage of time, and gestures of everyday care within an intimate emotional landscape.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, repetitive labor and accumulated time become material expressions of resilience. LO Yi-Chun, known for incorporating materials derived from Taiwanese cash crops into her practice, combines dried banana peels, banana fiber, and natural lacquer to create surfaces whose warmth and texture evoke human skin. In Colonel Reading Letters and the new work Woman with a Rosary, Lo responds to the tension of waiting in Gabriel García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel. One work focuses on the colonel as he receives a long-awaited letter, while the other turns to his wife, whose repeated prayers embody persistence amid political upheaval and material hardship. Through the tactility of her materials, Lo transforms the novel’s atmosphere of waiting and loss into one of quiet endurance. Working across painting, sculpture, and textile, Patricia Perez Eustaquio presents An Unraveling (Conversation Among Ruins, After Francisco). Using digital weaving, Eustaquio brings thread, fabric, and printed imagery together within a single surface. Responding to Filipino artist Juan Luna’s 1881 painting Cleopatra, she translates the gestures of classical painting and their transformation across time into a richly tactile woven form. Continuing her exploration of female subjectivity, Juin SHIEH returns in the new work Writing in the Void to the studio in her old family home in Taipei, revisiting the origins of her recurring “wallflower” motif. Once associated with marginality and being overlooked, the wallflower becomes a private space for inward dialogue and self-reconstruction. Moving between fragments of feathers and the image of a childhood dress with wings, Shieh constructs layers of imagery suspended between reality and imagination, turning painting into a process of reweaving the inner fabric of a life.
As artistic practice turns toward the intimate boundaries of the home and studio, close observation of immediate surroundings, plants, and fragments of memory gives rise to spaces of refuge. Ana Maria Micu observes her living and working environments with sustained attention. In new works including The roar of the ... folding the morning and precocious youngling ... Small Victories Matter, she records the seasonal growth and decline of plants in her studio alongside shifting patterns of light and shadow. Through this attentive engagement with plants and interior space, Micu evokes a quiet animistic condition in which human and nonhuman life coexist in mutual presence. Tracing historical origins and family memory, Andreea Medar uses hand embroidery as a central language of her practice across paper, canvas, and transparent plastic. In Picnic on Sohodol, needle and thread inscribe notes and landscapes associated with her homeland. In Sketch and The Gardener, embroidery extends onto transparent and semi-transparent plastic, allowing the warmth of the hand and the physical traces of stitching to connect everyday light, shadow, and memory across different surfaces.
Bringing together eight artists from distinct cultural contexts, Feminine Space considers how bodies, objects, light, and material can respond to the psychological and existential pressures of contemporary life. Across the exhibition, acts of making become acts of repair. Within the residual warmth of materials and the accumulation of time, feminine force emerges as a movement between inner and outer worlds, opening a space for reflection, refuge, and regeneration.
