Chen Tao-Ming / Tommy Chen / 陳道明
As a founding member of the Ton Fan Art Group, Chen Tao-Ming (陳道明) helped shape Taiwan's postwar modernist painting movement, pursuing abstraction as an intimate dialogue with material, time, and perception.
Artist Story
Tommy CHEN (Chen, Tao-Ming 陳道明) was born in Jinan in China in 1931. He left home at age eighteen to study at Taipei Teacher's College, where he learned modern painting from LI Chung-Sheng, whose students later formed the Ton-Fan Art Group. The development of modern art in Taiwan was pushed forward by the rivalry between Ton-Fan Art Group and the Fifth Moon Art Group. As a founding member of Ton-Fan Art Group, CHEN was and still is an important contributor to Taiwan's modernist painting movement in the postwar era and the first in his generation to commit to abstract art.
CHEN's painting is a documentation of his mind's travels, making them completely non-representational "records" of the artist's intimate dialogue with the nature of his material. In order to break away from symbols, his images rely on points, line, and texture. By experimenting with a variety of media, he widens the type of texture he could produce and the type of conversation he could have with his material, therefore pulling closer to a world of abstraction with the least interference and conclusiveness possible.
Ten years of training in traditional Chinese art and aesthetics gave CHEN a solid foundation in developing his own art. Unlike postwar Western abstract painters who concentrated solely on the materiality of painting for painting's sake, CHEN focused on reinterpreting Chinese painting principles. His work is fraught with tension between Chinese and Western pictorial strategy and material attributes, harmonized through his incorporation of the element of time in his methodology and treatment of the medium.
Read full biographyFeatured Works
Selected works and project texts are drawn from the public source site and reorganized into a gallery-like reading flow.
1959 / acquired 1968
A work in the National Museum of History collection, described on the source site as broad layered black, white, and yellow pigment over a red ground, representing Taiwan at the inaugural Paris Biennial of Young Artists in 1959.
Open work page
around 2010
A transitional work in which material operation begins to point toward seeing itself, with color fields and chromatic depth becoming unstable perceptual thresholds.
Open work page
around 2015
A late work where color no longer serves form, but generates space and turns viewing into an unfolding perceptual experience.
Open work pageComplete Archive
A visual index gathered from the public archive, connecting the artist's works, exhibition history, and critical writing.
7 visual records
Project Highlights
Viewing and perception
Seeing as a Field
This work, completed around 2015, shows that Chen Tao-Ming’s practice has entered another phase.
Here, color no longer serves the construction of form. There is no longer a clear structural order, nor any recognizable figure to rely on. The interfaces and masses that once provided support gradually dissolve, giving way to a more open perceptual condition.
Color no longer forms objects, but begins to generate space.
You may find that there is no longer a place for your gaze to settle. Your eyes drift and move across the surface. Front and back, depth and flatness, are no longer fixed relations, but continue to shift as you look.
Traces still remain, but they no longer point toward the formation of forms. They are closer to residues of a process. Time is no longer condensed into structure, but unfolds as an ongoing state.
Open project page
Essay
Abstract History
Tao-Ming Chen (1931-2017), an abstract artist best known as Tommy Chen, is a representative Taiwanese art figure on two major counts. Historically, his career paralleled—and helped launch—the country’s postwar modernism; formally, his works exemplify what might be called “hyper-subjective abstraction,” a style closely associated with Taiwan’s midcentury cultural character. Both contributions are based on the artist’s deft synthesis of Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions, skills, and temperaments.
Chen was born in Jinan, Shandong Province, in northwestern China during an extremely volatile period: the 22-year Chinese Civil War (1927-1949), which was exacerbated in mid-conflict by the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (1931) and the Second Sino-Japanese War
(1937-1945). Because Chen’s father was a government official, the family was displaced several times: first southwest to Chongqing (for three months) and Chengdu (two years), then back northwest to Lanzhou (10 years). In 1949, when Mao Zedong and his National Liberation Army triumphed throughout the mainland, Nationalist president-general Chiang Kai-Shek and his followers to depart for Taiwan, where they established an alternative government. The exiled Chen family numbered among its five children the 18-year-old Tommy, who enrolled at the Taipei University of Education.
Open project pageVideo / Podcast / Media
Video
Source-site YouTube embed for the artist publication and biographical program.
Video
Video media connected to the Vers la vie project page.
Spotify
Spotify episode embedded on the source website.
Publication
Immaterial and Light Perception
無形．光感．陳道明
藝術家出版社是一個以視覺藝術為主、泛藝術為輔的專業出版社，舉凡台灣美術、中西藝術、攝影、藝術文化旅遊、建築、設計工藝、陶藝、宗教美術、兒童美術等，皆涉獵出版，並多次榮獲行政院新聞局圖書出版金鼎獎、圖書主編獎、圖書美術設計金鼎獎及優良圖書推薦獎。歷年來出版的多元藝術書種，行銷海內外地區，讀者眾多，影響力深遠，對台灣整個藝術環境的發展與成長，有著舉足輕重的影響力。
Early Life and Influences
Open publication pageExhibitions / History
Art in Our Time: NTMoFA Collection Highlights
Open exhibition pageTommy CHEN Solo Exhibition: Rising from the East, Diver of Abstract Art
Open exhibition pageTranscendence from A far-Oriental Abstract Painting and the Tradition of Creating Ekaggatā
Open exhibition pageHistory Essays
From the Absence of Seeing to the Generation of Vision: Chen Tao-Ming’s Perceptual Experiments on Paper, 1975–2003
Abstract
This paper examines the work of Taiwanese artist Chen Tao-Ming between 1975 and 2003, a period marked by his withdrawal from exhibitions and the public art scene. Through the concept of “the generation of seeing,” the study explores Chen’s experimental works on paper as a sustained philosophical practice that challenges perceptual habits and the institutional norms of visuality. Employing unconventional materials and techniques, Chen’s creations transcend stylistic categorizations and instead cultivate a perceptual discipline rooted in the instability of images, the unconscious, and material contingency. By drawing on art philosophy, phenomenology, and curatorial critique, this study rethinks the conditions of visibility in art historical writing and exhibition-making, revealing the generative potential of artistic practices that operate in the margins of historical absence.
Read full essayFrom Historical Appearance to the Turn of Vision: Chen Tao-Ming, 1952–1965
Abstract
This paper focuses on the artistic trajectory of Taiwanese artist Chen Tao-Ming from 1952 to 1965, re-examining his “period of emergence” and perceptual shifts within the context of postwar East Asian modern art. It argues that although Chen began exploring abstraction as early as the 1950s and actively participated in founding the Ton-Fan Group and its international touring exhibitions, his artistic practice was never merely a stylistic evolution. Rather, it consistently engaged with the conditions and generative processes of seeing. By analyzing key works such as Structure (1952), The Wanderer (1957), and Towards Life (1959), this study reveals how his creations unfolded amid tensions between historical visibility, exhibition systems, and cultural diplomacy. After gradually withdrawing from the exhibition circuit in 1965, Chen entered a decade- long period of retreat, which eventually led, in 1975, to a sustained experimental practice on paper that questioned the very mechanisms of perception. This paper contends that Chen’s emergence and retreat were not oppositional phases, but formed a continuous trajectory from the borders of history toward the roots of perception. In doing so, this research not only reconstructs the historical position of a selectively forgotten modern
Read full essayFrom the Surface Outward: The Visual Construction in Chen Tao-Ming’s Canvas Experiments, 2003–2017
Abstract
This paper examines the canvas-based works of Taiwanese artist Chen Tao-Ming between 2003 and 2017, focusing on how his late-period paintings reconstruct the conditions of seeing through the manipulation of time, gesture, and visual structure. In contrast to his earlier experiments on paper (1975–2003), which centered on perceptual training and subconscious operations, Chen’s later works on canvas form what may be called “architectures of perception”—spaces shaped by layered traces, deferred completion, and a resistance to visual legibility.
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