Agi Chen is an artist of the "cartoon era" who excels at using semiotics to deconstruct her own enthusiasm for comic and cartoon characters. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

In recent years, cartoons and comics have moved into the mainstream of contemporary art. But at a time when many artists have been pushing to "deify" comic and cartoon characters, Agi Chen has chosen to express her passion by using the coldly analytical principles of semiotics to break down cartoons. This attitude of "deconstructing something precisely because you enjoy it" makes Chen's work unique and gives it philosophical depth.

Just 31 years old, Chen has already had 11 solo shows and garnered positive reviews for her symbolic "concentric color circle" vocabulary and her series on decoding cartoons and network interfaces.

"When you take away the doll-like shapes, what do the colors that remain reveal? Do colors convey social information?" Having posed such questions to herself, Chen set out to answer them.

When you visit Studio 18 near the Taipei Metro's Guandu Station, you can't help but feel the vibrancy of Taipei's art scene.

The building once belonged to the Guandu campus of Zhi-Ren School of General Education. When the school shuttered the Guandu site some years ago, a group of artists rented the three-story building. Agi Chen and her good friend Wu Yung-chieh now share a studio on the third floor.

Two computers sit atop Chen's large work table. Behind them are huge, brilliantly colored digital paintings, each featuring one or more multicolored concentric circles. Something about the circles seems vaguely familiar, but it's hard to put your finger on exactly what.