Wei-Chun Chu (he/him) is a visual artist working and living in Berlin.
Chu was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He developed a great interest in both art and science since childhood. At age of 18 he went to study physics at National Taiwan University. An year later he joined the university’s Fine Art Club and study oil painting under several tutors, including celebrity painter and songwriter Yu-Wei Hsieh and Chang-Lun Lin of the Rembrandt Art Studio in Taipei. After finishing the undergraduate program, Chu took the compulsory military service in Taiwan’s National Army. During this time he developed an enthusiasm in photography and trained his eyes and skills to make landscape and journalistic photographs.
After the military service, Chu was admitted in the doctorate program at Georgia State University in the United States, and subsequently earned the PhD degree in physics in 2009. From 2005 to 2008 he was a guitarist in the Atlanta-based rock band Dark Seeds, electro-rock act Sound Detour (SoundCloud, YouTube), and electro-pop project Phosphor Production. This role and the close contact with other musicians brought a strong influence of pop culture and fantasy/sci-fi content to his art works. In late 2009 he moved to Kansas State University as a research associate to further himself in academia.
In 2013, Chu moved from Kansas to Erlangen in Southern Germany to work in ultrafast and fiber optics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. He worked in the optics lab and was inspired by many fascinating light effects shown in microscopic cameras and rendered images, which were reflected in his abstract paintings. In 2016 he moved to Berlin and has been living there ever since. His focus is oil painting, while he keeps experimenting with print-making, watercolor, ink drawing, and digital art. He currently also works as a data scientist at Visier Inc.