In 2019, as part of the third cycle of Artists’ Residencies, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès welcomes artists Guillaume Poulain, Chloé Quenum and Yuhsin U Chang to the workshops of the house of Hermès.

Every year since 2010, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès has invited artists to explore the exceptional skills present in the workshops of the house of Hermès in France and beyond under the guidance of seasoned artistic mentors.
The Artists’ Residencies programme offers selected artists a veritable carte blanche to create new works using singular materials such as silk, leather, silver and crystal in close collaboration with the craftspeople of the house of Hermès. In an exclusive and unique creative experience, artists are invited to inhabit new contexts and shift their practices to explore new terrain.
Each artist produces two editions of each of the works that they create during their residency: one remains their own, whilst the other is conserved by the Foundation and presented in the workshops or in exhibitions.
The first cycle of the programme ran for four years and culminated in the exhibition “Condensation” that was presented at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) in 2013 before travelling to two of the Foundation’s other exhibition spaces: Le Forum in Tokyo and Atelier Hermès in Seoul. The second cycle of the programme was organised over three years and concluded in 2017 with the exhibition “Les Mains sans sommeil” at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris). The works created during this cycle were also presented at Le Forum in Tokyo in two successive exhibitions between September 2018 and January 2019.

→ The mentors of this third cycle of the Artists’ Residencies programme –which will run over three years– are artists Michel Blazy, Isabelle Cornaro and Françoise Pétrovitch.
→ The artists in residence for the second year of this cycle are Guillaume Poulain, Chloé Quenum and Yuhsin U Chang.

Guillaume Poulain (b. 1972, France)
In residence at Holding Textile Hermès in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes,
mentored by Françoise Pétrovitch.

→ Guillaume Poulain studied applied art at the École Estienne in Paris and fine art in the sculpture programme of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, from which he graduated in 1999, Considering art as “the possibility of opening up a perceived reality ”, he works with simple, everyday materials to instigate a dialectic between creative skills and the sociopolitical position of the artist in society. Through sculpture and installation, he appropriates commonplace objects, removing them from their primary functions to produce new forms that are unsettled, poetic and humorous.
In the 2000s, Poulain collaborated with the Buy-Sellf collective, which led him to exhibit his work at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta and CAPC — Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux.

Chloé Quenum (b. 1983, France)
In residence at the Cristallerie Saint-Louis, in Moselle,
mentored by Isabelle Cornaro.

→ Chloé Quenum graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2011, having exhibited her work the previous year at the Salon de Montrouge. Her investigation into the collective memory draws on an interrogation of anthropology, as well as on the history and culture of countries such as Benin or New Zealand, where she carried out a residency in 2018 as part of the Wellington-based Te Whare Hēra programme.
Rooted in spatiality, her projects consist of large-scale installations that blend décor and sculpture to reinterpret references and symbols. She is represented by Galerie Joseph Tang in Paris, and her works feature in a number of private and public collections, including those of the Frac Île-de-France, Grand Large – Hauts-de-France, and Lafayette Anticipations.

Yuhsin U Chang (b. 1980, Taiwan)
In residence at the Manufacture de Haute-Maroquinerie
in Aix-les-Bains, Savoy, mentored by Michel Blazy.

→ Yuhsin U Chang was born in Taiwan and has lived in France since 2003. Her work explores the forms and the poetics of the living world by developing raw materials such as dust, wool, linen, wood and charcoal into a sculptural vocabulary. Drawings, photographs and in situ sculptures offer an insight into the transitory character of organic material, between strength and fragility. Closely linked to the notion of metamorphosis, her works point to an equivocal conception of nature. After graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges in 2008, she participated in a number of collective exhibitions including “DYNASTY” at the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2010), “Afterlife” at the Musée Tot Zover in Amsterdam (2011), and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Changhua, Taiwan (2015) and the Festival Art, Villes & Paysage – Hortillonnages at the Maison de la Culture d’Amiens (2015 and 2017).

The Foundation operates nine major programmes with a combined focus on skills, creativity and transmission: New Settings and Artists in the Community for the performing arts, Exhibitions and Artists’ Residencies for the visual arts, Immersion, a French-American Photography Commission for photography, Manufacto, the Skills Factory and the Skills Academy for the discovery and perfection of artisan trades. H3 – Heart, Head, Hand is the Foundation’s worldwide programme of support for organisations whose work reflects these central aims, and its Biodiversity & Ecosystems programme enacts a core commitment to protect fragile ecosystems for future generations.
The Foundation’s diverse activities are governed by a single, over-arching belief: our gestures define us. www.fondationdentreprisehermes.org