Yuan Jai 袁旃

Born in Chongqing, Sichuan Province in 1941, Yuan Jai studied Chinese painting at the National Taiwan Normal University and subsequently went to Belgium for further education. While abroad, she studied not only examples of Art Deco and Art Nouveau but also of Cubism and Surrealism, which has been fundamental to her later stylistic development. Upon returning to Taiwan, she worked for decades in the Department of Antiquities at the National Palace Museum in Taipei and subsequently, she became inspired by the blue-and-green style paintings often on display at the museum. The main pictorial source for her work has been examples of the master paintings in the museum but she has integrated her own very contemporary structure into paintings that have been streamlined into geometric elements of vibrant color.