Pien was born in 1958 in Taipei, Taiwan, emigrating to Canada at the age of 11 with his family.^[5] At a young age, he began to draw and feels drawing propels everything he does.^[6] He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Western Ontario (1982) and a Master of Fine Arts from York University (1984).^[7]

Pien lives and works in Toronto, where he was a professor in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.^[3] He has also been an Artist-in-Residence, Painting and Drawing, Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montreal.^[8]

Pien`s practice is drawing-based. For his cut-outs, he uses an X-Acto knife as his drawing tool and traditional Japanese paper,^[9][10] or he constructs maze-like spaces using walls of crinkly paper grounds with drawings on them and through these large-scale installations he fashions a conduit into feeling and thought.^[11] He also is a photographer. In 2019, the Glenbow Museum (Calgary) held an exhibition titled Ed Pien: Our Beloved of 144 framed photographs of flowers hung together in a monumental, wall-filling installation to commemorate decorated gravesites at a cemetery in Santiago, Chile which is the final resting place for many political dissidents and victims of the reign of Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990.^[12] Also in 2019, he made a ghostly new print at NSCAD in collaboration, as he said, with the Atlantic Ocean.^[13] In 2020, to bear witness to the disruptions and unease brought on by the pandemic, he concentrated on making his Invasive Species, series of green-coloured drawings inspired by decorative Chinoiserie patterns as well as carefully observed plants and insects thriving in his own garden.^[14]

His work has been exhibited extensively throughout Canada and internationally, including, among others, at the Drawing Centre (New York),the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Canadian Culture Centre in Paris;^[15] Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa) partnering with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and Cambridge Galleries, The Contemporary Art Museum (Monterrey, Mexico), The Goethe Institute (Berlin),^[16] the 18th Edition of the Sydney Biennale and the 5th edition of the Moscow Biennale.^[17] The Corridor of Rain was featured at the Curitiba Biennial, in Brazil in 2018.^[15] In 2022, he showed Present: Past/Future at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a multisensory environment, which captured moments and memories of elders in Havana, Cuba which he had collected since 2014.^[15] It marked a change in his work into documentary film and portrait photography.^[18]

Pien's work is held internationally in the collections of over twenty-five museums, including the National Gallery of Canada,^[19] the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Centrum Beeldende Kunst (the Netherlands), Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporaneo (Costa Rica) and the Ordos Art Museum (Mongolia, China).^[20]

• Pien, Ed; Beaudry, Eve-Lyne (2010). Ed Pien: l'antre des délices = haven of delight. Joliette, Québec: Musée d'art de Joliette.

• de Zegher, Catherine (2016). Ed Pien : luminous shadows. London, Ontario: Black Dog and McIntosh Art Gallery.
• Jansma, Linda; Hatt, Gordon; Kellman, Tila Landon (2005). Ed Pien: in a realm of others. Lethbridge, Alta.: Southern Alberta Art Gallery.