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In the framework of the partnership between Tainan National University of the Arts and ENSAPC, the artist in residence Wei-Li Yeh will develop, in collaboration with six students, an exhibition with moving contours. Taking as a starting point the book of François Mauriac Maltaverne (Un adolescent d’autrefois), they will set out on the road to this place to find elements of reflection. Transformed into a workshop, Ygrec will be the site of personal and collective constructions and will constitute a platform welcoming various gestures and voices of artists and writers.

Maltaverne in/and/at Aubervilliers

« A proposition was made:
To teach an art course and come up with an exhibition at Ygrec.
An artist was chosen from Taiwan.
A reference is given by the teacher:
Maltaverne, A Novel About a Young Man From Long Ago (Un adolescent d’autrefois),
One of the last works by the famed French author Francois Mauriac.
Six students were selected from ENSAPC.
They are from Austria, China, France, Georgia, and Korea.
Discussions amongst them reveal who they are.
At one point, these seven people make a trip together to St. Symphorien for four days.
The visual art mediums placed before you here are decided by encounters with translations of the French text and this collective journey.
A heightened emphasis on process is an attempt to make transparent the creative impulse.
Works shown are not made to be complete, can they ever be?
The exhibition reveals the continual build-up of collaborative friction.
This friction gives a form that approaches understanding,
An understanding that the desire for resolution resides inside oneself,
And others alone. »

Wei-Li Yeh | Les Recollets | Paris | 2021

Wei-Li Yeh

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1971, Yeh immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister at the age of eleven. He grew up in Florida, USA and holds a BA degree from the Photography Department of the Fine Arts School of University of South Florida, Tampa,1994 and MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1997. Returning to live permanently in Taiwan in 2002, Yeh has been active as an artist, teacher, curator, and instigator.

Yeh’s large-scale and long-term collective and collaborative-based practice and projects are seen in major projects such as Treasure Hill Tea + Photo (THTP), New Day Street, and the ongoing Antiquity-like Rubbish Research & Development Syndicate. From 2015 to present, Yeh has been focusing on re-accessing and reactivating the life and work of the deceased artist Yeh Shih-Chiang by curating and designing exhibitions with Johnson Chang, archiving printed matter, artworks and inanimate objects of a lived life, and restoring/reconstructing physical architectural structures both interior and the surrounding landscape to function as the elder artist’s residence museum and archive center.

His work has been shown and collected internationally since mid-90’s including Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Lithuania, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and USA. Yeh’s photographic and text-based projects continue to explore the dynamics of the individual within collective practices, centering on both the personal and socio-political relationships between oneself and the city in which one resides. He currently lives and works in Shuinandong, Ruifang, Taiwan.