What’s on This November at Frieze No.9 Cork Street

‘A Blast of Lyricism: Contemporary Taiwanese Art in London’ | Tina Keng Gallery | 31 October – 15 November 2025

A major and wide-ranging exhibition in the United Kingdom dedicated to contemporary Taiwanese art, ‘A Blast of Lyricism’, a milestone collaboration between Tina Keng Gallery and curator Professor Chia-Ling Yang of the University of Edinburgh, introduces Taiwan’s evolving art discourse. 

The exhibition explores how Taiwanese artistic perspectives serve – and have served since WWII – as a space where Eastern and Western aesthetics converge. By taking lyricism as its central idea, it develops this into considering how the art space might also mediate between personal and collective experience. 

In Taiwan, postwar artists trained abroad absorbed Western lyrical abstraction and abstract expressionism, combining their colour theories and gestural vocabularies with traditional techniques and moods of East Asian art. By the 1980s, this art was engaging with political history and collective memory, grappling with martial law, rural transformation and questions of identity. Today, lyricism is moving beyond romantic sentiment, becoming a forum for material experimentation, sensory engagement and the questioning of inherited aesthetic authority. 

The exhibition features artists Ava Hsueh 薛保瑕 (b.1956), Chiang Yomei 蔣友梅 (b.1961), Chen Chun-Hao 陳 浚豪 (b. 1971), Yao Jui-Chung 姚瑞中 (b.1969), Yang Chung-Ming 楊忠銘 (b.1974), Su Meng-Hung 蘇孟鴻 (b.1976), Chiu Chen-Hung 邱承宏 (b.1983), Lee Juo-Mei 李若玫 (b.1985) and He Yusen 何宇森 (b.1995). It is organized into four thematic sections:

The Post-Republican Pseudo-Landscape (後民國偽山水)

How artists challenge ink art and landscape traditions to reinterpret Sinophone heritage.

The Secret Realm of Things (物的秘境)

The intersection of poetics and materiality, using everyday objects and organic forms to evoke memories and connections.

Temperature of Feeling (情的溫度)

Using disrupted narratives and open-ended compositions to reflect on cultural translation and Indigenous identity.

All Conditioned Phenomena (有為法)

Evoking the cyclical nature of time, continuous transformation and the fluidity of being.

Events

Artists in Conversation | Thursday 30 October, 5.15pm – 6.15pm 

With Professor Ava Hsueh 薛保瑕, Dr Su Meng-Hung 蘇孟鴻, and Professor Richard Thomson (University of Edinburgh) 

RSVP 

Artists in Conversation | Friday 31 October, 3.30pm – 4.30pm 

With artists Chiang Yomei 蔣友梅 and Yao Jui-Chung 姚瑞中, and Professor Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford). 

RSVP 

Artists in Conversation and Tea Cocktail Party | Saturday 1 November, 3.30pm – 4.30pm 

With artists Chen Chun-Hao 陳浚豪 and Yang Chung-Ming 楊忠銘, Professor Chia-Ling Yang 楊佳玲 (University of Edinburgh), and Gene Chen 陳建今. 

RSVP 

‘A Blast of Lyricism: Contemporary Taiwanese Art in London’ has been realized with generous support from Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and its Taiwan Content Plan.

9 Cork Street, W1S 3LL, 31 October – 15 November 2025, Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm.

Further Information

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^{Main image: Chiang Yomei, After the Fire, 2016. Oil and mixed media on canvas, 127 x 127 cm. Courtesy: Tina Keng Gallery}