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. Based in Taipei, he is a member of two collectives: Print & Carve Dept. (a woodcut print collective) and Trapped Citizen (a 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 as continuous with the woodcut-poster-and-pamphlet tradition that has long served the print medium's mass-political function. His central interest lies in collective creating and how democracy and equality are realized through that process.

Chen's work was selected for the Tokyo University of the Arts 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 — among them Pangrok Sulap (Sabah), Prickly Paper (Guangzhou), Print & Carve Department (Taipei), Printhow (Hong Kong), Printmaking for the People (Manila), Taring Padi (Yogyakarta), Woodcut Wavement (Shanghai), and Lam Lok-san (Hong Kong). The exhibition addressed the contemporary emergence of woodcut printmaking across the inter-Asian region, with artists and collectives intervening in society through their work, creating together with the public, and inspiring one another across the limitation of borders. Chen took part in the accompanying symposium panel 'Practice and Experience II: Media Thinking / Intervention in the Field', alongside Lam Lok-san, Jay Lau Ka-chun, and Printmaking for the People, moderated by Lee Chun Fung.

Chen's documented prints shown in the exhibition 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 across the region's pro-democracy movements; and 'Miramar Union Will Win the Strike' (2021) — a labour-solidarity print produced in support of union strike action in Taiwan. Together the titles document his commitment to a protest-print tradition that reaches back to 1930s-era Chinese revolutionary woodcut and continues through the Indonesian Taring Padi tradition (founded 1998) and the contemporary Inter-Asian woodcut collective movement.

The Print & Carve Dept. collective emphasizes collaborative authorship, with multiple hands contributing to a single work and the collective, rather than an individual artist, credited as its creator — an approach in keeping with Chen's stated interest in collective creation.

In 2021 Chen took part in 'Art for (and within) a Citizen Scene 4: Musical Hangout', an online workshop on collaborative publication design presented with Framer Framed, the Amsterdam-based art space. His continuing organization of Trapped Citizen events and Suck Glue Boys gigs in Taipei demonstrates a practice that resists any clean separation into 'printmaking' and 'organizing' compartments; he frames woodcut, music, and event-curation as continuous expressions of a single Do-It-Together ethos, extending the political-print tradition into contemporary Sinophone and Southeast Asian solidarity networks.