Meet the artists: Moumita Basak and Yen-Yu Tseng

Yen-Yu Tseng (Taiwan) is a textile artist whose talent shows in visual art with textile materials, as the form of tiny sculpture, textile installation and mural tapestry. After her received MFA degree at Tainan National University of the Arts in 2015, she won the 16th Li Chun-Shan Visual Art Award in 2020. Her works were collected by Rothko Museum in Latvia and Lih-Pao Cultural Art Foundation in Taiwan, as well as selected in many international textile art biennial exhibitions. Also, Ministry of Culture, National Culture and Arts Foundation, National Taiwan Crafts Research Institute and Taipei City Government of Department Cultural Affairs had granted her to support projects, exhibitions, as well as Acció Cultural Andorra, Canada Council for the Arts and Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec.

She was the residency artist at Akureyri Art Museum and Icelandic Textile Center both inIceland, Basque Bio-design Center in Spain, Faberllull in Andorra, Mentoring Artists for Women's Art and  Maison des métiers d'art de Québec both in Canada, Jim Thompson Art Center in Thailand, Rothko Museum in Latvia, Environmental Sculpture Association Center and Hong-gah Museum and Wellspring by Silks Jiaoxi all in Taiwan, Lize Puppet Art Colony in Taiwan.

Moumita Basak (India) holds an MA from the Governmental College of Arts And Crafts in Calcutta, India. Born in 1996, Burdwan, Moumita Basak comes from a village in India where she recognises that her relationship with her home weighs heavier than with her external environment. It is her entanglement with nature and the acknowledgement of how she strays from it every day that inspires her work. She speaks of womanhood and her experiences of growing up in India as a woman. 

“My medium and art-making techniques are deeply rooted in the socio-cultural fabric of the region I belong to and my personal experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal society. As an eco-feminist artist, my usage of motifs of plant weed, abandoned clothes and tea as colour explores issues like gender inequality, politics of clothing and the rural-urban divide in India” 

Her work resonates with themes of experience, memories and familiar surroundings. It is these spaces that she inhabits that inspire her practice. She speaks of loneliness as a friend that everyone has. A relationship strife with turmoil, disturbance and yet joyous and peaceful. These emotions with her loneliness also percolate into her practice. Basak works with various mediums such as textiles, waste cloths, hand stitching, machine embroidery, the traditional Indian Kantha, tea and coffee tints and unique prints.