Taipei artist Weng Zhenling opened her solo exhibition 'Failed Love' (失敗的戀愛) at Yi Yun Bookstore (異雲書屋) on October 22, on view through November 21. The show gathers new works in copperplate etching, intaglio ink on pineapple paper and incense burning, centered on a long scroll that gives the exhibition its title.

Weng's proposition is that 'failure' in love sits not at the end of a relationship but inside it. She describes the process as kneading clay over and over: one partner reshapes herself to hold the other's affection until the original form is lost. In the title scroll, entwined bodies press close while their gazes drift elsewhere; the character for love (愛) repeats across the surface, announcing what the figures cannot feel.

Her source materials are deliberately promiscuous. She draws on Edo-period shunga — particularly Utamaro's 'Poem of the Pillow,' where intimacy is conveyed through posture rather than exposure — and on Taiwan's online discourse around the label 'Tai-Niu' (台女), which flattens wildly different women into a single stereotype. Weng says many different people get 'compressed by one convenient word,' and paints the deformations that labeling produces: stretched, twisted, proliferating bodies making room for incompatible expectations. Manga enters too, via the wounded bodies of Maruo Suehiro and the grotesque tradition of muzan-e, which she uses to give fear and dependency a physical shape.

The artist's recurring bald, nude figures return here as a self-projection that has gradually opened toward other women's experiences. She invited her own mother to sit as a model, hearing her demur that her post-childbirth body was unfit to be drawn — a conversation that led Weng toward bodies that need not meet any model's standard. The show continues a trajectory that included her 2024 solo 'Changing Bodies' and her selection for Art Taipei MIT in October 2024 with Ministry of Culture support.