Kuei-Hua Lin’s work is both public and personal. Her paintings take on issues that are universal to modern society and specific to her home of Taiwan. And like her home country, her personality, and her beliefs, her work has many facets, some obvious and even more hidden beneath the surface.

Known for her vibrant use of color, layered techniques, and engaging subject matter, Lin’s work fluidly moves between intimate memory and urgent social observation. Let’s Have a Fight, OK? reframes conflict as ritualistic expression rather than animosity driven destruction. The exhibition highlights recent series that span from playful childhood scenes to urgent reflections on democracy, freedom, and collective identity. 

The exhibition title is meant to be playful; a phrase more in line with asking to have a dance or a party. Fighting is about posturing; it's about show; it’s about performance. Kids fight. Animals fight. Adults fight. Taiwan's congress is famous for these outbursts of restrained violence; a mix between staged vehemence and primal release. The television often shows legislative sessions devolving into chaotic melees designed to show off genuine passion of elected officials to their watching constituents; moments of pandemonium contrived as demonstrations of commitment. In Lin’s hands, these gestures become sites of curiosity and reflection, where struggle itself is recast as a form of connection. 

Fifteen years ago, Lin left a career in industry to pursue painting full-time. She began with figure drawing and self-study, eventually breaking away from traditional approaches to develop her own spontaneous and intuitive techniques. Her process combines the palette knife and silkscreen in a way that is uniquely her own, producing dynamic contrasts of transparency, texture, and color. 

Lin’s themes are drawn both from personal memory and collective experience: flamboyant flame trees in bloom across Taiwan, children absorbed by the glow of electronic devices, playful childhood games, and the chaotic brawls of Taiwan’s legislature. Each series is a witness to joy, danger, and the fragile freedoms she has experienced growing up in Taiwan’s transition from authoritarian rule to democracy.  

Lin’s work has been exhibited widely in Taiwan, including solo shows at KAI’s Gallery, Dimensions Art Center, and Regent Hotel Taipei, and in institutions such as the Tainan Art Museum and National Taiwan Normal University. Let’s Have a Fight, OK? is her first presentation in the United States. 

Statement from the Artist

Fifteen years ago, I made a firm decision to change careers. I left the industry world and became a full-time painter.

Since childhood, I’ve always had a deep curiosity about the art world. Whenever I had the chance to visit art museums, exhibitions, or art fairs, I was often moved, sometimes even overwhelmed, by the beauty of the artworks I saw. In bookstores, I would linger in the art section the longest. I often found myself browsing around art supply shops, asking the staff questions like: “How do you use this pigment? This tool? This material?”

In the years leading up to my career shift, I took figure drawing courses at community colleges and art schools. At first, I taught myself: buying and reading books, studying color theory, experimenting with different paints, solvents, papers, and tools, and learning how to mount and frame works. I made many mediocre paintings and framed them myself, hanging them around the house to look at daily. As I gained more experience, I started identifying key issues in my work. Eventually, I realized I needed to break free from traditional approaches and develop my own spontaneous and intuitive techniques, something that would reflect a personal style I truly loved.

Starting in 2016, I fell in love with acrylic paint. Unlike oil paint, acrylic is water-soluble, odorless, easy to clean, and environmentally friendly. I also fell in love with the palette knife! Using knives of different shapes and sizes offers a wide range of possibilities and is quite intuitive. Mixing colors directly on the canvas with a knife preserves color purity and can create multi-layered effects with transparency and vividness.

Later, I discovered new ways of using silkscreen techniques that go beyond conventional methods. The combination of palette knife and silkscreen is, in my view, a perfect match. When paint is squeezed onto a screen and blended with a palette knife, it produces beautifully subtle gradients. Or, when a screen is placed on top of a painted surface and scraped over repeatedly with a knife, the resulting textures can vary from rough matte to mirror-like finishes, a contrast that creates a dynamic visual tension.

Contrast is one of the most important elements in my work; contrast in color, size, shape, brightness and shadow, line weight, and more. The more types of contrast a piece contains, the more vivid and engaging it becomes.

The themes of my work are often drawn from my own life. For example, my flower series was inspired by the flamboyant flame trees planted all over Taiwan. Every summer, the fiery red blossoms bloom high up on the trees. I would bring a light ladder to the trees, climb up with my camera to photograph the flowers, then return to my studio to enlarge the images and paint from them. Many people in Taiwan love the vivid red flowers of the flame tree. Interestingly, when they saw my paintings, they often asked what kind of flower it was, because normally one can only admire them from below, never up close or in detail.

In my 3C Series, I depict modern society’s obsession with electronic devices (3C stands for Computer, Communication, and Consumer Electronics). No matter a person’s nationality, age, identity, or occupation, everyone is constantly on their phone. What’s most striking is how even toddlers who can’t read yet are captivated by these devices.

Another series, Fighting for Play, is inspired by my childhood. In the neighborhood where I grew up, lots of wild kids played in the alleys after school, and I was one of them. We caught dragonflies, played hide-and-seek, chased each other, roughhoused and laughed uncontrollably. That joy was unmatched. As an adult, I thought I’d never feel that kind of pure happiness again. But over the past ten years, four grandchildren were born. With them, I play tag, have pillow fights, pretend to wrestle, and laugh so hard it feels like we’ll burst through the ceiling! I created this series to preserve those moments.

In recent years, I’ve found myself drawn to subjects that reflect not just personal memory, but collective experience. As someone who has lived through Taiwan’s transformation from authoritarian rule to a vibrant democracy, I’ve witnessed firsthand how fragile and precious freedom can be. These lived experiences inevitably find their way into my creative work, especially as new threats to that freedom become harder to ignore.

Since martial law was lifted in 1987, Taiwan has gone through waves of protest and unrest. In 1996, the country held its first direct presidential election and began building a robust democratic system. Over time, the legislature matured, society stabilized, and the economy grew.

Currently, the Chinese government continues to falsely claim that Taiwan is part of its territory and has threatened to take the island by force. It wages disinformation campaigns, manipulates public opinion, and promotes pro-China, anti-democratic narratives. More alarmingly, it has exerted influence over local legislators, pushing policies that weaken Taiwan’s sovereignty. Violent confrontations in the legislative chamber, where some representatives block proceedings and physically brawl, have become disturbingly common. These scenes are not just political drama, they represent a real danger to the freedoms we’ve worked so hard to build. Watching this unfold, I felt compelled to document it through painting.

For me, painting has always been a way of paying close attention—to nature, to people, to joy, and to danger. Whether I'm capturing the overlooked beauty of a flower from above, the glow of a screen on a child’s face, or the chaos of political conflict, I paint to bear witness. Art allows me to hold both tenderness and urgency in the same frame. The act of creating; of mixing, layering, and contrasting; is also an act of questioning and caring. In this way, my work is not only personal but also inseparable from the world I live in.