Meng-Yeh Chou
2006

Meng-Yeh Chou’s playful Bonsai series, created during her residency at 18th Street (2006), took part in the group show, “Depicting Action: An International Festival of Time-Based Art.” From colorful ceramic pots sprout curious white, wiry forms that cross-reference the art of Britto and Harring with the work of Lynn Chadwick. Chou uses eye-catching colors and patterns with edge.  Another installation piece covers walls and floor with muscle fiber-patterned wallpaper: a matrix of closely set thin red lines suspend simplified human forms that resemble stars.  She also contributed mixed-media sculpture and video to the group show, “Frolic: Humor and Mischief in New Taiwanese Art,” held at Taipei Gallery in New York (2007).  The same year, Chou added text to a performance art piece entitled “Don’t Go Too Far,” in which a man lays sprawled in the street, surrounded by sandbags and foreboding messages written in chalk on the pavement, shown in Taiwan. Meng-Yeh Chou offers fast-action video of melting blocks of colored ice. Her work has been described as “trippy, freaky sort of aesthetic that is energized and direct.