Urban Night Life is a series of pastel on-site sketches made by Meng-te Chou between 1987 and 2003, depicting the colorful scenes of late-night clubs and taverns and evoking endless fanciful imaginings. When we see these pictures, we desire to learn the stories that lie behind the drinking and dancing patrons they portray; likewise, we feel curious as to the motivations of the artist behind the sketches.

Meng-te Chou moved to Taipei from southern Taiwan in the early 1980s. By day he drove a taxi, and at night when he was free he painted as a pastime. Nighttime bars gradually became his preferred painting spots. For Meng-te Chou, nightclubs were like a different world with a new, alien culture. It stood in stark contrast to the simple, orderly life of the countryside. This filled the artist with incomparable amazement, and he attempted to explore it. Correspondingly, for Taiwan, nighttime bars are also a new, exotic world, evoking associations of the colorful scenes of revelry from the Japanese colonial period or the days of the American military presence on Taiwan, or even the lounge bars widely popular with yuppies today... In the dreamy realm created by dark rooms, multicolored lights and music, people forget all that has transpired during the day. Clearly, this is the desire to escape the constraints of one’s own subjective existence, a plunge into the anesthesia of an exotic culture.

Meng-te Chou’s paintings possess a strong character of self-reflection. They wander back and forth between a here-and-now concentration on the lowest levels of life and a corresponding exotic world. Many of his early works are rendered through large use of easily obtainable ballpoint pens. They portray the closest observable object – an angle-steel rack, the wooden leg of a single bed, a sewing machine. These ordinary objects that can be found in ordinary homes are evidence of the lifestyles arising throughout the evolution of Taiwanese history. Just like the late-night bar scenes of Taipei that the artist depicts, for us, disappearing old customs and new fashions have all taken on an exotic tone. And through the rear-view mirror of his taxi, Meng-te Chou gazes attentively at each scene.