Signs of Life: Tsai Yun-Ju

Tsai Yun-Ju makes in Signs of Life, her first solo exhibition at Bernheim London, and it is a wager the paintings more than sustain. Working across monumental canvases and intimate tempera panels, the London-based Taiwanese artist constructs an exhibition organised around a deceptively simple premise: perception is not passive reception but active, error-prone, projective labor. What we see when we look at an abstract painting tells us as much about the architecture of our own cognition as it does about the work itself.

 

 Opening Reception: Thursday, 04 June | 6–8 PM

 

Exhibition Dates: 04 June – 24 May, 2026

Location: Bernheim, 1 New Burlington St, London W1S 2JA

 

The technical foundations of Tsai's practice are as layered as the paintings themselves. Her training in Gongbi, the classical Chinese ink painting tradition defined by meticulous brushwork and painstaking, incremental precision, provides a conceptual as much as a technical substrate. Against this, Tsai presses a second inheritance: the luminous spatial logic of Italian egg tempera, particularly the frescoes of Masolino da Panicale, whose Baptism of Christ she encountered on a recent trip to Italy. The result is a painterly syntax that belongs wholly to neither tradition and is enriched by both, a surface practice in which translucent layers (between ten and twenty per work) accumulate into fields of pastel complexity that feel simultaneously ancient and irreducibly contemporary.

 

This show will be held concurrently at Bernheim, London, alongside David Flaugher, In Dog Years I’m Dead.