Ku Chi-Chun 辜琪鈞

Biography

Ku Chi-Chun is a Taiwanese painter and calligrapher who works in mineral pigment, ink and gold leaf. She has shown at Art Capital in the Grand Palais Éphémère and at Art Shopping in the Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, and in Venice, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Busan, Tokyo and Los Angeles. The Taiwan Ministry of Culture Art Bank holds two of her calligraphies; the Taipei Representative Offices in France and in Singapore hold a mineral painting and a calligraphy. Her layered mineral-pigment method is protected by a utility-model patent. She founded DE Global Art Agency in Taipei, which represents more than 250 artists across Asia and Europe, and ALEA, an association in Paris whose peer-reviewed journal she publishes.

She first held a brush at primary school and has not changed course since. At the National Taiwan University of Arts she read calligraphy and painting; her master's thesis was on how brush and ink enter poster design. For some years she taught full time, in public schools and then international schools, and went on to manage a Ministry of Education higher-education programme at National Taiwan University. She resigned to paint. Without a grant, she took her work and a box of business cards to galleries in Japan, Korea, France and the United States, from Design Festa in Tokyo and Art Busan to Art Shopping at the Carrousel du Louvre and, later, Art Capital at the Grand Palais Éphémère.

She paints in 膠彩: mineral pigment ground from stone, bound with animal glue and laid over more than twenty layers of hand-mounted paper, with gold leaf, mica and crystal pressed into the last. The method descends from the Dunhuang murals and the Tibetan thangka. She calls her programme Neo-Oriental Humanism, and its plainest case is the mandala. In a thangka the mandala is symmetrical and a deity sits at its centre; in her tondi it opens to one side, a lotus in bloom built from bands of colour, and the viewer takes the centre. The calligraphy makes a shorter argument. Handwriting is receding in a screen-led age, and a character written by hand is proof that a body was here.

The studio became an organisation. DE Global Art Agency represents more than 250 artists across Asia and Europe, runs the Kyla Artist Prize, on whose jury she sits, with the next final round in Tokyo, and co-curated a group exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum with Hakudō Kobayashi. ALEA, at 253 rue Saint-Honoré, carries the academic side: a double-blind journal, a board of professors from 26 universities, exchange between Taiwan and France. Her brand work, from hand-lettered logotypes and the Häagen-Dazs × Louvre edition to commissions for Gucci and Mercedes-Benz and fashion partnerships with Kiton, Stefano Ricci and Shiatzy Chen, serves the same end as the calligraphy, which is to keep a thousand-year-old line in public view. At TEDxYongkang she spoke on The Power of Devoting a Lifetime to One Pursuit, the decision she made as a child and what came of it.

Asked where the organisation came from, she says she joined up the jobs she had already held: the classroom, a university office, a corporate consultancy for TutorABC, the studio, the fair floor. Each is now a department of DE Global. The thesis on poster design became a lettering practice for brands, and the studio method was written up as a patent. She still goes to the studio every day and waits for the pigment to dry.