YU Jen-chih
Métamorphoses
From November 7 to December 23th 2025
Following his acclaimed 2024 exhibition at the Couvent des Cordeliers for the Avignon Off Festival (curated by Morgan Labar), where he presented monumental works, and his two major solo exhibitions in 2025 at the Bernard Boesch Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in La Baule (curated by Philippe Larue) and the Tariria Art and Culture Center in Van, Turkey (curated by Kay Ngee Tan Architects, Singapore/London/Istanbul), YU Jen-chih now presents us with an intimate work that marks a turning point in the artist’s oeuvre.
These new drawings, engravings, and paintings, presented in the “Metamorphoses” exhibition at the Robert Dantec Gallery, reflect a desire for a return to restraint. The drawings resemble phrases and engage in a dialogue with the new, refined, and graphic engravings. Using only ink, gouache, and charcoal, the artist asserts a new sobriety and gets to the heart of the matter. Meanwhile, the oil paintings on canvas seem to be fragments taken from the pictorial symphonies of the gigantic formats to which he had previously accustomed us.
“These new drawings are to me like the silences between notes in contemporary music. They materialize a spatiality. They are also a poetic writing in which fragments of my reflection on art shine through.”
YU Jen-chih
Biography
A painter, engraver, and art critic, Yu Jen-chih was born in 1977 in Taipei, Taiwan, into a family of artists and intellectuals. He studied Fine Arts at Tunghai University (Taiwan) from 1995 to 1999, and then earned a Master’s degree in Film History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Earlier in his career, he held two solo exhibitions in his hometown. From 2008 to 2014, he participated in several group exhibitions in Bahrain, Colombia (Bogotá), Ukraine (Dnipropetrovsk City Museum), as well as in galleries and cultural spaces in France (Paris, Dinard, Brest, Quimper), Italy (Avellino), Georgia (Georgian National Music Center, Tbilisi), and Argentina (MACLA, La Plata). In 2017, the Kwang-Hua Information & Culture Center in Hong Kong dedicated a retrospective of his complete engraved work, entitled “Between Titans and Giants.” The Red Zone Arts Gallery also held solo exhibitions of his work in Geneva (2014) and then in Frankfurt am Main (2019). In the fall of 2023, the City of Nantes – Nantes Métropole presented his very large-format works at the Maison de l’Erdre in a solo show entitled “Torments and Ecstasy.”
After being represented for many years in France by the now-closed Galerie Rollin Pompidou in Paris, the artist is now represented in France by the Galerie Robet Dantec in Nantes. In Asia, YU Jen-chih is represented by Alisan Fine Arts Gallery, Hong Kong. His works are held in several private collections as well as in public collections (National Library of France, Archives and Museum of Literature, Royal Library of Belgium, Bernard Boesch Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art – La Baule).
