Charwei Tsai – Charwei Tsai

Islamic Arts Biennale

Charwei Tsai
That Which at First Tastes Bitter, 2025
Mica pigment and ink on cotton
395 x 758 cm each of the 2 panels
Islamic Arts Biennale 2025
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Commissioned by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation for the Islamic Arts Biennale 2025
With support by Makhtut Studio, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and Fondation Comblé, France

Photos by Muhannad Shono, Filwa Nazer, Lucia Novoa, Courtesy of the Islamic Arts Biennale and the artist

At the Islamic Art Biennial, currently taking place in Jeddah, Charwei Tsai presents a newly commissioned installation, “That Which at First Tastes Bitter,” as part of AlMadar (“The Orbit”), a section dedicated to fostering collaboration between institutions with significant Islamic art collections.

Tsai’s work enters into dialogue with a 10th-century Samanid ceramic plate from the Louvre Museum collection, renowned for its Kufic inscription: “Magnanimity is at first bitter, but ultimately sweeter than honey. Good health.”

It is composed of two parts in union as a circle, with a void in the center, creating a sense of rhythmic flow and alluding to an expanded cosmos. Kufic calligraphy, specifically الحلم (Al Hilm), meaning patience, tolerance; or ‘Ilm: knowledge, radiates from the wide rim of the plate with a balance between form and void. The surrounding walls are covered with a painting made from mother of pearl pigment and the artist’s repeated inscription of specifically الحلم (Al Hilm). The resulting work invites viewers to experience the idea of spiritual and universal resonance, connecting the past with the present.

Special thanks to:

Diriyah Biennale Foundation

Artist Directors: Julian Raby, Amin Jaffer, Abdul Rahman Azzam, Muhannad Shono

Curators: Joanna Chevalier (Associate Curator), Masa Al-Kutoubi (AlMadar lead), Amina Diab (Associate Curator), Rizwan Ahmad (Curator), Heather Ecker (Curator), William Robinson (Curator), Marika Sardar (Curator), Sarah Al Abdali (Assistant Curator), Bilal Badat (Assistant Curator), Faye Behbehani (Assistant Curator), and Wen Wen (Assistant Curator).

Special thanks: Muhammad Al Irissi, Arwa Al Ali

Support: Ana La Fonta, Berenice Levy, Ana Salazar, Aden Wessels, Latifa Albokhari, Elena Bongiorno

Production: Black Engineering, Marco Lepore, Lucia Novoa, Mariela Velasco

Makhtut Studio: Abdulrahman Elshahed, Layal Algain, Zainab Mumtazali, Majdoline Bakr, Raja Bahadar

Louvre Museum: Souraya Noujaim, Noemi Dauce, Nicolas Texier, Martina Massullo

OMA Architects: Kaveh Dabiri, Andrea Verni

Conception: James Wall, Chateau Comble, Hayfa Algwaiz, Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty

Palais des beaux Arts

Autohistorias
Co-curated by Skye Arundhati Thomas, Tadeo Kohan, Louise Nicolas de Lamballerie

24 April ~ 30 June 2024
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France

Exhibited works: The Songs We Carry, 2017~2018, Video, 18min
In collaboration with Tsering Tashi Gyalthang

“If I don’t have access to the truth, I’ll invent it, I’ll tell myself, preferring my fictions to the lies and truths that others fabricate for me, about me”. (Gloria Anzaldúa, Ethnic Autohistorias-teorías: Writing the History of the Subject).

In 1989, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote a formally inventive text that oscillates between poetry, personal narrative, historical commentary and politics. The essay is a toolbox. Anzaldúa encourages an active subjectivity and invites us to seize our intimate stories and fiction to shape our collective narratives.

Driven by this spirit, autohistorias brings together a group of artists who – from the 15th to the 21st century – have used the self as a way of telling history, shaping political allegory and using narrative as a means of emancipation.

autohistorias presents a group of auto-fabulists, chimeras, beautiful liars, chingadas and bad girls who traverse complexity with literary flair, aesthetic clarity and performative memory. Fiction, autobiography and speculation become the tools for composing a collective narrative and memory; an individuality that is guided not by absolutes but by ambiguities.

The exhibition brings together works by student artists and from the heritage collections of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, as well as those of guest artists. Self-portraits, hybrid collages, invented languages, parallel worlds – made up of personal histories and intimate archives – are presented. autohistorias composes a common space-time born of intersubjectivity, enunciation and listening. Thursday evenings will feature an artistic program, details to follow on beauxartsparis.fr.

Les Beaux-Arts de Paris is a partner of Paris Gallery Weekend, an event organised by the Comité professionnel des Galeries d’art, inviting the public from 24 to 26 May to 3 days of free, open- access exhibitions, meetings and events in 101 Parisian galleries. The autohistorias exhibition is part of the VIP programme of Paris Gallery Weekend.

Credits:

Mélanie Bouteloup and Armelle Pradalier (co-directors of the “Artists & Exhibition Professions” program)

Scientific advisor for the Beaux-Arts de Paris collections: Giulia Longo, Curator of Prints and Photographs

Students in the field

Mathilde Badie, Idris Bennai, Elise Bergonzi, Anna Breton, Clara Brevet, Aïssa Diallo, Clémence Gbonon, Anna Giner, Audrey Japaud Garcia, Feryel Kaabeche, Léontine Köhn, Anouk Léger, Mahault Maréchal, Emma O’Quigley, Noah Perrot-Bikie Bi Mbida.

Among the artists

Aya Abu Hawash, Malek Abdelmajeed, Sonia Andrade, Ali Arkady, Mohamed Azouzi, Amanda Baggs, Anna Boghiguian, Mohamed Chafei, Antoine Conde, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (after), Ladji Diaby, Antoine Dochniak, Jean Louis André, Mehdi Gorbuz, Francisco de Goya, Anis Nabil Harbaoui, Hessie, Lubaina Himid, Liên Hoàng-Xuân, Nina Jayasuriya, Bahar Kocabey, Simone Lagrand, Lalita Lajmi, Hugo Laporte, Nge Lay, Lisa Lecuivre, Huda Lutfi, Sehaj Malik, Nicole, Clarisse Pillard, Lou Reina, Jagdeep Raina, Rembrandt, Roseman Robinot, Vega Royer Gaspard, Saradibiza, Sequoia Scavullo, Mahmoud Sehili, Afrah Shafiq, Margarita Sherstiuk and Igor Kanivets, Elisabetta Sirani, Charwei Tsai, Libo Wei, Alexandre Yang, Mia Yu, Unica Zürn and anonymous.

Mori Art Museum

WORLD CLASSROOM: Contemporary Art through School Subjects Learning Art and the World Together, Mori Art Museum, Exhibition, Tokyo, Japan, September 2023

Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
20th Anniversary Exhibition
WORLD CLASSROOM:
Contemporary Art through School Subjects
Learning Art and the World Together
19 April ~ 24 September 2023

Since the 1990s, when the development of contemporary art began to be considered from multiple perspectives in different parts of the world, we have been seeing that contemporary art today goes far beyond the framework of arts and crafts and fine art in the school classroom. It is a composite field with connections to all subjects, including language and literature, mathematics, science, and social studies. In each of these disciplines, researchers are exploring the “unknowns” of the world, delving into history, and making new discoveries and inventions from the past to the future in order to enrich our perception of the world. The stance adopted by contemporary artists that seek to go beyond our preconceptions in a creative way is also connected to this exploration of these unknowns. In this sense, the contemporary art museum is something akin to a “classroom of the world” where we can encounter and learn about these unknown worlds.

WORLD CLASSROOM: Contemporary Art through School Subjects, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Mori Art Museum, is an attempt for us to encounter a world we have never seen or known from a wide variety of perspectives, using the subjects we learn at school as a gateway to contemporary art. Even though this exhibition is divided into such sections as “Language and Literature,” “Social Studies,” “Philosophy,” “Mathematics,” “Science,” “Music,” “Phys. Ed.,” and “Transdisciplinary,” each work, in fact, crosses over multiple subjects and domains. While over half of the approximately 150 exhibited works will be drawn from the Mori Art Museum Collection for the first time ever, there will also be newly-commissioned artworks for this exhibition – altogether creating a “classroom of the world,” place of learning with works by 54 artists/artist groups.

PHILOSOPHY: The field of philosophy, which explores the universal meaning of the world and life has long had a very close relationship with artistic expression. Philosophers have pursued the fundamental principles that govern human birth, life, and death, while artists have also confronted these essential notions and created various forms of artistic expression. In the 20th century, the notion of “putting art back in the service of the mind,” advocated by Marcel Duchamp in the field of contemporary art, and which operates on the viewer’s thoughts rather than at the level of visual beauty, emphasized the importance of the ideological and philosophical aspects of art and has had a profound influence on the art that came after. Artistic expression is not limited to Western philosophy, which has had a great influence on modern society: it is also a place where various ideas, beliefs, and cultural values from around the world including Eastern thought intermingle. Works of art dealing with themes such as existence, time, nature, the afterlife, faith, and salvation demonstrate how each artist observes, perceives, and expresses the essence of this world.

Charwei Tsai takes Buddhist philosophy as her subject matter, expressing the diversity of religious beliefs and evanescence of the world through familiar motifs such as food, plants, and flowers. While Miyajima Tatsuo also expresses a Buddhist view of life and death, through the minimalist expression of numbers projected onto digital counters, an industrial product, he gives form to the lives of people that are born and die. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s performances where she gives lectures to the dead, according to her, represent her own process of understanding death.

Lee Ufan’s paintings and sculptures visualize a state of exquisite thinking through elements stripped down to an absolute extreme, creating a contemplative space imbued with a unique sensation of tension and stillness. Nara Yoshitomo’s paintings evoke a warm presence within stillness. Perhaps it is the way the expressions on the faces of the children depicted in his paintings represent a kind of essential innocence and delicateness we all contain that attracts so many people.

Curated by:
Kataoka Mami (Director, Mori Art Museum)
Kumakura Haruko (Assistant Curator, Mori Art Museum)
Kondo Kenichi (Senior Curator, Mori Art Museum)
Tsubaki Reiko (Curator, Mori Art Museum)
Tokuyama Hirokazu (Associate Curator, Mori Art Museum)
Yahagi Manabu (Assistant Curator, Mori Art Museum)
Martin Germann (Adjunct Curator, Mori Art Museum)

Gwangju Biennale

Gwangju Biennale, Soft and Weak Like Water, 2023

Gwangju Biennale
Soft and Weak Like Water
Curated by Artistic Director Sook-Kyung Lee, Associate Curator
Kerryn Greenberg, and Assistant Curators Sooyoung Leam and Harry C. H. Choi
7 April ~ 9 July 2023
Gwangju, South Korea

Gwangju Biennale, 2023 – *Soft and Weak Like Water*

Charwei Tsai’s multimedia practice meditates on the complexities among cultural beliefs, spirituality, and transience. The 14th Gwangju Biennale brings together two significant bodies of Tsai’s work, Spiral Incence Mantra – Hear Sutra, 2023, is composed of spirals of incense that are custom made by a family-owned incense factory in Tainan, on e of the oldest regions in the south of Taiwan. Passages from the Heart Sutra – a Buddhist scripture that distills the wisdom of impermanence – are inscribed on the incense spirals, which are suspended in midair. The idea that they can be lit and gradually transformed into smoke and ashes signals the Buddhist concept of emptiness. Works from A Temple, A Shrine, A Mosque, A Church series, 2022 consist of khoos, handwoven palm leaves that were traditionally used for household objects. They are hand-inscribed with verses from female Sufi poets. Tsai conceived the project in collaboration with Al Ghadeer UAE Crafts in Abu Dhabi to honor the women of the local community and their knowledge of working with local frats using natural materials from the region.

Special thanks to: Natasa Petresin-Belechez, Art Dubai, Al Ghadeer UAE Crafts, Jau-lan Guo, Wei-lun Chen, Guan-Wei Lin, Hsuan-Chiao Wang, Chao-Yu Tseng, and Pei-Cen Lin

A Temple, A Shrine, A Mosque, A Church

A Temple, A Shrine, A Mosque, A Church, 2022 – Gold ink on hand-woven mats by craftswomen

A Temple, A Shrine, A Mosque, A Church Series, 2022
Gold ink on hand-woven mats by craftswomen from Al Ghadeer, Abu Dhabi
300cm x 5 pieces (orange), 150cm x 4 pieces (green), 150cm x 4 pieces (purple)
Commissioned by Art Dubai, UAE
Special thanks to Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Al Ghadeer UAE Crafts

in my soul
there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church where i kneel.
prayer should bring us to an altar where no walls or names exist.
~ Rabia Basri, 6th century Iraq

This series of khoos, handwoven with local palm leaves, was traditionally used for household objects. Here they are hand-inscribed in gold with verses from women Sufi poets. This project is made in collaboration with Al Ghadeer UAE Crafts in Abu Dhabi to honor the local women community and their skills and knowledge of working with crafts using ecologically sustainable materials from the region.

Work Title: My Rest Is In My Solitude
“Brethren, my rest is in my solitude,
And my Beloved is ever in my presence.
Nothing for me will do but love of Him;
By love of Him I am tested in this world.
Whereso I be I contemplate His beauty;
He is my prayer-niche; He mine orient is.
Died I of love and found not His acceptance,
Of mankind I most wretched, woe were me!
Heart’s medicine man, Thou All of longing, grant
Union with Thee; ’twill cure me to the depth.
O Thou, ever my joy, my life, from Thee
Is mine existence and mine ecstasy.
From all creation I have turned away
For union with Thee mine utmost end.”
~ Rabia Basri, 8th century Basra, Iraq
Translated by Martin Ling

Work Title: If I worship You
“O Lord, if I worship You
Because of fear of hell
Then burn me in hell
If I worship You
Because I desire paradise
Then exclude me from paradise
But if I worship You
For Yourself alone
Then deny me not
Your eternal beauty.”
~ Rabia Basri, 8th century Basra, Iraq

A Temple, A Shrine, A Mosque, A Church Series, 2022 – Gold ink on hand-woven mats by craftswomen

Work Title: Your Prayers Were Light
“Your prayers were Light
And your worship peaceful,
Your sleep an enemy of prayer.
Your life was a test, but you let
It go by without a thought.
It’s ever-passing, slowly vanishes
Before you know it.”
~ Rabia Basri, 8th century Basra, Iraq

Work Title: At Dawn My Heart Said I Should Go
“At dawn my heart said I should go
Into the garden where
I’d pick fresh flowers, and hope to see
His flower-like beauty there.

I took his hand in mine, and oh
How happily we strayed
Among the tulip beds, and through
Each pretty grassy glade;

How sweet the tightness of his curls
Seemed then, and it was bliss
To grasp his fingers just as tight,
And snatch a stealthy kiss.

For me to be alone beside
That slender cypress tree
Cancels the thousand injuries
That he has given me.

He’s a narcissus, tall and straight!
And so how sweet to bow
My head like violets at his feet
And kiss the earth there now.

But your drunk eyes don’t deign to see me,
Although I really think
It’s easy to forgive someone
The worse for love or drink.

And though it’s good to weep beneath
God’s cloud of clement rain,
It’s also good to laugh like flowers
When sunlight shines again.

My heart was hurt by his “Checkmate”;
I think I must prepare
To seek out wider pastures then,
And wander off elsewhere.

Jahan, be careful not to say
Too much; it’s pitiful
To give a jewel to someone who
Can’t see it’s valuable.”
~ Jahan Malek Katun
14th Century Shiraz, Iran

Work Title: Your Face Usurps The Fiery Glow and Hue
“Your face usurps the fiery glow and hue of roses;
And with your face here, what have I to do with roses?

Your ringlets’ fragrance is so sweet, my friend,
No fragrant rose-scent could entice me to seek roses –

Besides, the faithless roses’ scent will fade,
Which is a serious drawback, in my view, of roses;

And if the waters of eternal life
Had touched their roots, so that they bloomed anew, these roses,

When could they ever form a bud as sweet
As your small mouth, which is more trim and true than roses?
~ Jahan Malek Katun
14th Century Shiraz, Iran

Work Title: Suppose a Breeze Should Bring to Me
“Suppose a breeze should bring to me
My lover’s scent –
I’d sacrifice my heard and soul
And be content…”
~ Jahan Malek Katun
14th Century Shiraz, Iran

Work title: Each New Flower Opening in the Morning Light
“Each new flower opening in the morning light,
Filling my heart with glory and delight…
Even before its perfume reaches me
Destruction’s wind has swept it from my sight.”
~ Jahan Malek Katun
14th Century Shiraz, Iran

Work title: In Rapture I Was Then That One Did Appear
“In rapture I was then that One did appear
living in heart where others did disappear.
Now none is taken unless like me they be:
that One knows I made the mystery clear.”
~ Aishah Al-Ba’Uniyah
15th century Ba’un, Syria

Work title: You Are the Earth, You Are the Sky Too
“You are the earth… You are the sky too;
You are the night, the wind and the day:
Sandalwood, rose, water, grain, are You.
You are… all! What to offer? Please do say!”
~ Lalla Ded / Lalleshwari
14th century Kashmir, India

Work title: On My Tongue Your Name I Whisphered
“On my tongue Your name
I had whispered,
my mouth and lips by this
were sweetened…”
Bibi Hayati Kermani
mid 18th century, early 19th century Kerman, Iran