The "Courtyard" series originated from Dong Shaw-hwei’s home, which is a Japanese bungalow style house, located in Taipei, Taiwan. The series contains a reminiscence of the domestic culture experienced by the artist, and is also influenced by the consequent changing in her life. In the work in this series, Dong tries to retain all her treasured memories and on the other hand, to reflect the Chinese traditional wisdom which is close to the ideas of ‘Taoism’. The courtyard is full of wild trees, naturally opulent potted plants and flowers. This garden naturally changes with season, keeping traces of time and memory, and therefore having profound cultural implications. Dong treasures such time and atmosphere of her courtyard dearly. However, these old courtyard-surrounded houses are quickly vanishing as Taipei’s metropolitan area is going through drastic change and modernization. Dong records these elements in her paintings for history as well as for her own recollection. During this period of her artistic creation, her style was a continuation of her development in Post-Impressionistic painting, showing objects in boldly bright colors with undulating shadows and controlled brushwork.
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Dong Shaw-hwei was born in 1962 in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her B.A. and M.F.A. from the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University, and worked as an art teacher in Taipei Municipal Song-Shan Senior High School. Dong traveled in Europe several times for solo exhibitions and published catalogs in 1994-2007. She has worked as Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Taipei Department of Visual Arts. In her early period, she studied the style of impressionism, and learned how to express the shadows and color from western painting. She devoted to analysis of the Zhuangzi’s thought and aesthetics when she studied in the graduate school of art. The thesis was published as the book Aesthetic Significance of Zhuangzi’s Thought, gradually refining and adding depth to her painting style, and also started a process of self-realization through uniting her life and her art. Since the late 1990s, she created her unique style with the “Still Life of Black Table Series”, as well as the “Courtyard in Black and White Series”. Dong restructured the common space in daily life on her paintings with many plants, wooden tables and chairs. Her important solo exhibitions include Twin Oaks of National Register of Historic Places in the Washington, D.C., and Unfettered Heart – 2013 Dong Shaw-hwei New Works Solo Exhibition at Asia Art Center Taipei in 2013. Her recent exhibition is Transgression throughout the Volatile World Inaugural Exhibition of Asia Art Center Taipei New Flagship Space in 2021, In Courtyard, Recollecting Precious Moments of Life: Dong Shaw-hwei 2017 Solo Exhibition at National Museum of History, Taiwan in 2017.