The collective body of work of Wen-Jen Deng: The Embedded Stitch Contemporary Fiber Art from Taiwan is the artist’s 2025 amazing solo exhibition which ran from June 4 through June 28 at the Tenri Culture Institute on West 13th Street in Greenwich Village.
Deng is an extraordinary Taiwanese embroidery artist (also known as a “fiber artist”) who combines oil-painting, embroidery, floral-based oil paintings, and soft sculptures.
She uses dyed embroidery and stitched soft sculpture to forge a language of cultural geography and history. Rooted in Taiwan’s cultural landscape and informed by field research and residencies across the world, her work draws on indigenous motifs, food culture, and deep historical truth to create textile narratives of place and belonging. Through hand-dyed fabrics and thread, Deng maps a visual world shaped by ecological observation and cultural circulation. Her “quiet feminism” emerges through material intimacy — reclaiming fiber art as a vital medium for self-expression and placing it firmly within the mainstream of contemporary art history.
Background and Identity to Her Art
Deng was born in Dongzhu, Hualian, in 1970 to an aboriginal mother and Taiwanese father. Her grandfather is Hakkanese. She loved graffiti since she was a child and began oil painiting at the age of 10. Her father did not openly support her artistic career at first, but has come around to silently supporting her. Deng thanked her father and sister for their sponsorship, her mother for her “spiritual protection from Heaven,” and the art partners she has worked with over the years.
She graduated in 1999 from the National School of Fine Arts (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts) in Paris, France. Her early work featured oil paintings with mixed media, grounded in everyday life on traditional Taiwanese floral fabrics.
Her recent works focus on Taiwan history, aboriginal culture, and ethnic integration. She has incorporated her love of the outdoors through mountain climbing and discovery, by blending these elements of life exploration into her tapestries and indigo dyeing map creations.
Although her most notable large scale works focused on field research and landscape-based mapping, such as Globalization at Table, Kuchapongone, and Cloud Leopard go Home, her soft sculpture series stitched representations center on food. With food soft sculptures, Deng approaches her art as a carrier of memory, emotion, and identity.
International Residencies
Since 2016, Deng has been an artist in residence in Pingtung (Taiwan), Pune (India), Los Angeles, and New York City. Currently, she is completing her residency in New York at Governors Island at House 17 with the Taiwanese American Arts Council under its founding Executive Director Luchia Meihua Lee.
The exhibition at Tenri Cultural Institute included a 30 minute documentary film showing Deng creating her work in each city between 2016 thru 2024, as well as traveling and adapting to life and new friendships within those cities during each residency.
WEN-JEN DENG TAIWANESE FIBER ARTIST EXHIBITION of her large-scale extraordinary works runs from June 4th through June 28th at Tenri Cultural Institute in Greenwich Village. Photo by Kaju Roberto.
Fiber Work on Governors Island: The Taiwan Map
Deng is currently composing and weaving her outdoor latest fiber art sculpture on Governors Island. She is making steady progress on her woven sculpture Taiwan Map, a large-scale fiber art piece that captures the cultural and geographical essence of Taiwan. Through intricate weaving and layered textures, Deng transforms traditional materials into a poetic cartography of memory, identity, and place. In June, the completed work was unveiled to the public on Governors Island as part of the ECO ART ON ISLAND program.
Final Thoughts on the Artist
I really admire Deng for both her incredible quality and prolific body of work she has been creating in the realm of the embedded stitch. It is highly labor intensive. Everything in her art is grown naturally. The dyes are made from all natural products grown in Taiwan. The fibers are whittled by hand from plant leaves which are gathered fresh from nature.
Watching her documentary film you will see how much work goes into the preparation of the raw materials even before the creation of the artwork begins. Deng does almost all of it herself, and it is both astounding and exhausting to watch.
Read this article on the Taiwanese great fiber artist Wen-Jen Deng where I originally wrote it in The Village View:
Wen-Jen Deng: Her Amazing Fiber Art Solo Exhibition at Tenri Culture Institute
Listen for our latest Talking Taiwan interview with amazing fiber artist Wen-Jen Deng. For more information:
Kaju Roberto is an accomplished musician, singer/ songwriter, journalist, and an award-winning producer. He is the artist Rad Jet on Spotify.