Curriculum Vitae

Yachi Peng is a digital artist and with a comprehensive background in fine art, modern Chinese painting, art education and performance. Her work has been show in ew York, Singapore, and Taiwan, as well as the Siggraph Asia Art Gallery, Dumbo Art Festival Open studios, Taiwan Provincial Fine Art Exhibition and National Hsinchu Living Art Center. Yachi believes in the important of art education and was a junior lecturer with the Taiwan Ministry of Education and a research assistant with the Taiwan National Science Council. As a dancer, she is devoted to promoting Flamenco performance and was invited to perform at Hsinchu City Hall, and Cultural Affairs Bureau of Hsichu County.

She started her aesthetic journey at age seven. A remarkable Taiwanese Nihonga artist and art educator, Professor Yen-Chin Lu at National Hsinchu University of Education was her mentor who taught her traditional Chinese painting, watercolor, and esthetics from 1986 to 1995. Yachi was enrolled in talented art classes from elementary to High school and received a grant and Excellence Award for her High school graduation project for her effort and talent in mixed media, Chinese painting, and design. In her undergraduate years, she led an art team, “O °C Re-Assemblage,” which was sponsored by National Chiayi University and was supervised by Professor Jin-Shiow Chen. The group explored the relationship among spaces, medium, performances, and art. They experimentally transformed conventional display spaces including a local store, Chiayi Railway Warehouse, and Alishan Forest Railway into new art sites.

In 1997, “Land, City, and Symphony,” organized by ten contemporary Taiwanese artists, was the first large-scale public installation in Taiwan. Yachi was selected to assisted artist Wen-chih Wang who exhibited artwork in the Venice Biennale and Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris. The indescribable atmosphere of the complicated interactive behaviors between the audience and Wang’s artwork impressed she deeply. This later led her to explore interactive media.

From 2001 to 2005, her extensive experiences brought opportunities to collaborate with educators and computer artists. She assisted Professor Hueyching Janice, Director of the Audio-Visual Education Center, in the Hsin-Chu University of Education to develop an e-Learning project “The Beauty of Chinese Porcelain” which was sponsored by the National Palace, and “Integration of the Art and Technology to Education” program initiated by the Taiwan Ministry of Education.

These valuable experiences encouraged her to apply the graduate program of the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute in New York, where she studies interactive media, physical computing, installation and digital performance.

Selected by Siggraph 2007’s Mentor-Apprenticeship in San Diego, she assisted Osaka University associate Professor Ichi Kanaya in the Emmerging Technology section and was included in the Student Volunteer Fabulous list. In 2008, she interned at EYEBEAM art and technology center. She collaborated with Ayah Bdeir on a wearable computing project, “TETA HANYA’S SECRET” and “MEEM” a multi-touch language learning system using Flash AS3. She has been working as a graduate assistant for Professor Peter Mackey from 2006 to the present. She collaborated with Flamenco performer Viola Mark-kelly in her thesis project Resonant Wave which combines an experimental performance and a physical computing installations. It attempts to represent the essential beauty of the various gradations of percussive sounds and dynamic motions that are derived from the unique Spanish art form.

An inexhaustible curiosity and persistent motivation for research have allowed Yachi to expand her vision, enriching her work with a mixture of art forms and collaborative experiences. Her goals and dreams are to profoundly explore and experiment with the intersections of art and technology and to share that vision with others. Please feel free to leave comments and communicate with her.