Chen Wei-lun

Chen Wei-lun is a Taiwanese woodcut printmaker, musician, and event organizer whose practice is rooted in the collaborative-democratic ethos that has emerged within the Inter-Asian woodcut printmaking community since the late 2010s. He is a member of two Taipei-based collectives: Print & Carve Dept. (a woodcut print collective focused on collaborative production) and Trapped Citizen (a multi-disciplinary collective organizing music performances, film screenings, and discussion based on a 'Do-It-Together Ethos'). Under the pseudonym Suck Glue Boys he organizes punk gigs and underground events, treating event organization itself as a continuation of the woodcut-poster-and-pamphlet tradition that has historically served the print medium's mass-political function.

Chen's work was selected for the Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) exhibition 'Debordering: Woodcut Printmaking Practice in Inter-Asian Context' at the Chinretsukan Gallery (28 April - 8 May 2023), which presented twelve artists and art collectives from across Asia. The exhibition's organizing concept addressed the contemporary emergence of woodcut printmaking practice across the inter-Asian region, with artists and collectives 'intervening in society through their works, creating together with the public, and inspiring each [other] across the limitation of borders.' Chen was a panellist at the accompanying symposium 'Practice and Experience II: Media Thinking / Intervention in the Field' alongside the other Asian collectives included in the exhibition (Pangrok Sulap from Sabah, Prickly Paper from Guangzhou, Print & Carve Department from Taipei, Printhow from Hong Kong, Printmaking for the People from Manila, Taring Padi from Yogyakarta, Woodcut Wavement from Shanghai, and Lam Lok-san from Hong Kong).

Chen's documented prints include 'Scream for Wuhan City' (2020) — produced during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic when the city of Wuhan was under lockdown and Sinophone solidarity prints were circulating across Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asian print networks; 'Checkerboard Stands for Unity Not Division' (2020) — a politically inflected print addressing solidarity between democratic and pro-democracy movements across the region; and 'Miramar Union Will Win the Strike' (2021) — a labour-solidarity print produced in support of the Miramar Hotel and Resort union strike action in Taiwan. The trio of titles documents his commitment to the protest-print tradition that connects 1930s-era Chinese revolutionary woodcut, the Indonesian Taring Padi tradition since 1998, and the contemporary Inter-Asian woodcut collective movement.

The Print & Carve Dept. collective's working method emphasizes collaborative authorship — multiple carvers working on a single block, multiple printers pulling impressions, with the collective rather than the individual artist named as the print's creator. This approach explicitly inverts the conventional Tokyo Geidai pedagogical emphasis on the individual artist's signature print, and the Debordering exhibition's curatorial statement framed the Print & Carve Dept. inclusion as a deliberate intervention into the institutional individual-artist convention.