From rural childhood to assisting the family’s wet market stall, and now full-time labor in a nursing institution, farming as repetition and endurance anchors his practice. Daylight is toil, nightfall is soil. In the care facility, Chiu confronts aging and death daily. His labor is consumed by systemic demand yet rendered invisible by its logic. He refuses to reduce elders to cases, painting their vitality and returning dignity denied by institutional structures. His images grow from this double ground: invisible labor and the soil of resistance.

For Chiu, painting is labor as vital as living itself, and a testimony that speaks through silence. As a child, his tipsy grandfather once asked, “Are you mute?” The remark exposed his silent, observant disposition, a family language of action without words. His paintings insist: silence accumulates into color, suppressed voice erupts as image. He paints directly from memory, without sketches or photographs. As memory distorts, contours blur, registering the pain of disappearance. Toil and Soil is cultivation of memory itself: distorted, aching, fragile. It is also cultivation of identity: a young artist shaping his own voice from silence, insisting on a worldview forged in rupture.