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An exhibition of abstract geometric painting on shaped marine ply. Forms on Edge AIRSpace Project 05-20 August 2016 One of the ideas that sustains Nheu’s visual exploration is the relationships the body forms in the space it inhabits. ‘Relationships’ encapsulates the experiences of a body in a myriad of affect and effects, both tangible and intangible. The background narrative is told through the female body of a perpetual migrant with a culture of birth that is predominantly patriarchal. Resettlement and adaptation brought changes in traditionally assigned roles. Negotiations for place and roles in the new community at large, and at a micro level within the family unit, were acutely felt. These ideas form the basis of the visual framework for the exhibition. Visually, the placement of paintings in an enclosed space becomes the metaphor in the process of resettlement. Like fields with no borders, encapsulated experiences are by nature inter-corporeal; identity is socially constructed and defined by borders and forms. The exhibition as a whole attempts to amass these two seemingly contradictory elements and dwell at its meeting points hedging edges to redefine place and space. The paintings are in effect formed by these edges where space and borders meet. The space the paintings inhabit plays an integral role in the composition of the exhibition. It is used literally in the context of the negotiation of space. Paintings are made with implied sustained emotions that define these ‘bodies’. The visual cues for these are surface treatments, shapes, quality of the edges where two spaces meet, and ultimately, how they claim the space they inhabit. Photographed by Joy Lai & John Dennis

A record of works on paper submitted for Paper Contemporary, Sydney Contemporary 2023 2023 Paper Contemporary a Sydney Contemporary event

An installation of abstract geometric paintings on shaped marine plywood, exhibited in SLOT’s window space. The work explores the notion of an obvious presence—something visually assertive yet deliberately overlooked to maintain the status quo or preserve a sense of equanimity. The Elephant in the Room Acrylic on marine plywood, soft plastic 355x220x90 cm SLOT 20.12.2015 - 20.01.2016 Anie Nheu’s art is about space. Most literally in this piece, it is the space between 2 pictures. This is the gallery exhibit almost always overlooked, the artefact essential to all museums, it’s the place where something isn’t, as Anie Nheu describes it, the Elephant in the room. In this piece, the gallery-like space around the work has been artfully “sculptured” into a form of equal importance to the objects that make up the exhibit. And it is the art of a dance. A painted colour doesn’t cover an entire surface; it leaves a colour behind that pushes the form back while correspondingly the wall pushes forward. At another moment holes cut in the work offer lagoons of white wall while offshore two islands of colour seem to have been deposited, “Spratley like”. This picture is not presented on a wall, it’s colonising the wall. Gently underlining the fact that it has taken ownership of the space. Gracefully wrapping around a corner in the wall and quietly stepping off the wall onto the floor this work has arrived in our space, subtly merging with our space as we observe its elegant form. In her notes on the piece, Anie Nheu describes her work as “identity formation” a process where the obvious can go unsaid. Here among the morphing relationships of her forms she reads the emotive content of the work that replicates her life as a migrant. Travelling with her parents from Taiwan through the 3rd world to Australia what might have been a firm foundation for most of us was fluid for Anie. Things have never been just one thing for Anie. And if we think for a moment few things are ever just one thing. This elegantly restrained work approaches the edges of most art and fearlessly steps across them. With out hesitation it side steps the self-serving clatter or transactional enterprise and in its place offers us poetry reflection and silences that otherwise would remain unseen, the elephant in the room, perhaps. ctre of what is perceived. Tony Twigg

A work of installation of mixed materials: plastic serving plate painted in gold colour, abstract geometric painting on 3 panels of hessian used for coffee beans exports, and an Ikea child chair in white. Paean Installation with painting on hessian, plastic serving plate, Ikea chair SLOT 28.04.2019 - 01.16.2019 Like many artists, Anie Nheu sees her life reflected in her art. She feels that because her life went one way rather than another her art has permission to go that way as well. As this idea of representation grows it becomes an exercise in mapping that can chart life across generations. It can stretch to accommodate ancestors and locate the artist with in a pantheon of concerns that artists will often describe as their way of making sense of the world. Anie was born on the road, as she said “moving from place to place with my parents since the civil war in East Timor”. To live a life, as she sees it, in 3 parts, now drawn into a “harmonious whole”. This is the map she has given us. Sketched out on 3 hessian bags stitched together with twine and Anie’s painting that has settled across the surface in a way that does not obscure the origin of her bags - bags,metaphorically that she has lumped since her days in East Timor as an infant. Of course the work is a painting, symbolic of nothing more or less than itself. It gracefully observes the conventions of abstraction and achieves a beauty that is new to the hessian sacks. But Anie has included some jarring elements. The work is improbably placed on the wall, as if she were to continue working on it rather than display it for our considerationThere is a chair, arbitrarily placed that seems to contradict our preconceptions of scale. And far off to the side is a golden oval that might be something venerated. The painting that is a map has been given its own space; its own set of preconditions that is different to ours. It is somewhere else. Tony Twigg

Several Ways of Conversations, 2012 As a follow-up to Yarns Between Bubbles, this second collaborative project brings together Asian artists Li Wenmin and Yiwon Park in Seoul, South Korea. The mixed media works on paper explore themes of identity by responding to each other's mark-making, while also providing space for each artist to express their individual voice within the shared composition. Several Ways of Conversations, 2012 As a follow-up to Yarns Between Bubbles, this second collaborative project brings together Asian artists Li Wenmin and Yiwon Park in Seoul, South Korea. The mixed media works on paper explore themes of identity by responding to each other's mark-making, while also providing space for each artist to express their individual voice within the shared composition.