Introduction

In his book The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting, the late American art historian James Cahill (1926-2014) proposed that in the transition from the Ming to Qing dynasties in the 17th century, painters were faced with a choice of varying styles and tastes. In discussing this complex legacy of traditional genres and styles that left painters of the early Qing dynasty with a multiplicity of choices, he cited three representative artists—Wang Hui (1632-1717), Wang Yuanqi (1642-1715), and Shi Tao (1642-1707).¹ A similar situation occurred in the life of Hsu Yu-Jen, who was born in the wake of World War II.

The styles inherited by post-war Taiwanese artists were no less complex than in the 17th century: Should they continue with the Nihonga painting techniques encouraged by the official Taiwan Fine Art Exhibition (Taiten) of the Japanese colonial period and the model of en plein air painting pioneered by Ishikawa Kinichiro (1871-1945)? How should the many different Chinese schools of art—the post-May Fourth New Art Movement brought over to Taiwan from China by the KMT government; the traditional Chinese painting of the “Three Masters Who Crossed the Sea” (Chang Ta-Chien, Puru, and Huang Chun-Pi); the realistic painting style of propaganda materials for “resisting Japan and suppressing bandits,” etc.—be incorporated into Taiwan’s fine art system? And which one of these schools of art should Hsu Yu-Jen, born in 1951, choose to study, as the one most suited to his own creativity?

Looking back, Hsu was uninterested in any of the aforementioned styles, whether they were native to Taiwan or imported from China. In 1975, after graduating from the Chinese painting program at National Taiwan Academy of Arts, Hsu chose a meandering and rugged creative path. He moved to the USA three times, but did not settle down there. Drifting and instability seem to have been in his DNA. In 2024, Taipei Fine Arts Museum held “Hsu Yu-Jen: A Retrospective” for the artist, now 74 years of age. This essay seeks to observe Hsu’s art at close range and to analyze and position his trajectory of development, with the aim of placing his work in the context of Taiwan’s post-war art history. It is hoped that this research can serve as a foundation for future research on Hsu Yu-Jen.

Cold War-era Artistic Germination (Art Academy Period, 1971-1975)

Hsu was born in Jiali, Tainan County, part of the “Salt Zone” celebrated in Taiwanese literature. It was in this place of scarce resources, barren land and ubiquitous salt flats that Hsu Yu-Jen grew up. In 1972, he entered the fine arts department of National Taiwan Academy of Arts (today’s National Taiwan University of Arts) in Banqiao. From several interviews I have had with the artist, as well as comments he has made in documentary films, it is clear he holds few good memories of his experience at art school. Because his creative approach differed so greatly from the pedagogical ideas of his instructors, he almost failed to graduate.² In that regard, during his art school days Hsu had already demonstrated his impatience with and disdain for the art education system. (See plate, P.94-95) He frequently skipped his classes and instead went to see exhibitions at the National Museum of History on Nanhai Road or the National Palace Museum in Waishuangxi, regarding the art he took in there as his personal source of nourishment. Later, in his “Fine Brush” landscape series, he created works that were influenced by two paintings in the National Palace Museum collection: Fan Kuan’s Travellers Among Mountains and Streams and Guo Xi’s Early Spring. In Taiwan of the 1970s, an art student’s visual art resources were in fact extremely limited. Very few well-printed catalogues or reproductions were available to observe or learn from (the Nigensha Publishing Company of Japan only began printing high-quality reproductions in cooperation with the National Palace Museum in 1979); moreover, modern art museums would not make their appearance until the 1980s.³ Fortunately, original works were on display at the National Palace Museum and the National Museum of History, delivering an enormous visual impact to the young Hsu Yu-Jen and profoundly influencing his artistic learning.

If Hsu could not find the creative nourishment he needed from school, a different course of learning outside the academic system, under the tutelage of Lee Chun-Shan (1912-1984), became a vital source of inspiration. Hsu recalls that he often took the night train to Changhua and then went to study at Lee’s studio the following day. “Hsu Yu-Jen: A Retrospective” features several of his works from 1973, including his Automatic Sketches and Invisible series, all of which reflect Lee’s pedagogical influence on his concept of automatic painting.⁴ Looked at in more detail, Lee’s approach emphasized the pursuit of originality, which derived from two major steps: (1) awakening the inner self based on Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) theory of the unconscious mind; and (2) abandoning the established norms of academic teaching (perspective, chromatology, etc.). Under such influence, it is no wonder that Hsu felt an aversion to the academic system of the National Taiwan Academy of Arts.

Among his ink-on-paper works from his art academy period, Mountains and Clouds and Trees and Stones (See plate, P.75, 77) are a little similar to the mid-1980s ink paintings of Yu Peng (1955-2014). The ink in both of these works is rather diluted, and they both lack the mode of linear expression found in traditional literati painting, with its emphasis on “infusing calligraphic brushwork into painting.” Interestingly, in the same period Hsu also produced the 1974 ink-on-paper works Self-Portrait and Corm, which can serve as a contrast. In Self-Portrait and Corm, he painted his shapes with a brush, making short, slender lines. Perhaps it was lines such as these somewhere in between Eastern and Western orientations that made Hsu’s Chinese painting teachers feel “uncomfortable.” He drew these thin, short lines not only with a brush, but also with a technical pen or ballpoint pen as a substitute.⁵ The reason his Chinese painting teachers could not accept it at the time was likely that Hsu’s system of lines had already broken away from the brush-and-ink aesthetic of Chinese literati painting. Western painting, on the other hand, would allow the same lines to roam freely and contentedly, without the slightest apprehension, just because they would be recognized as lines in a drawing. By the time he graduated from the art academy in 1975, he most likely had already forsaken the path of “Chinese painting.” What lay ahead of him was the road of modern ink drawing, oil painting, and mixed media.

The Call of the American Dream (1979-1989)

After Hsu Yu-Jen graduated, he performed his military service and was sent to Kinmen Island. In 1975 the Cold War had not yet ended, and China was bombarding Kinmen on odd-numbered calendar days. According to his own oral account, he was a member of the Kinmen Defense Command during his service. As a soldier, it was difficult for him to draw pictures, and he only had the habit of writing in notebooks, but several of these were confiscated. In 1978, after getting out of the army, he produced such works as Self-portrait in a Tunnel, Self-portrait as a Soldier and Self-portrait on a Wire Mesh Fence. In the period following his military discharge, he was not particular in his choice of materials, using crayons or water-based pigments on ordinary paper. In these works that looked back on his army days, his colors were gloomy and dark. He also applied thick layers of crayon, which gave the works a heavy, breathless feeling.

Fortunately, he learned from a friend that he could apply to have his works shown at the American Cultural Center (run by the United States Information Agency) on Taipei’s Nanhai Road, and it was there that he had his first major solo exhibition, in 1979. During the Cold War era, the U.S. Information Agency not only played the role of a window on Western culture in Taiwan, but was also the most important institution for many young literature and art enthusiasts to access Western literature, information and art.⁶ With the encouragement of Hsi Te-Chin (1923-1981), he obtained a visa to the United States in the capacity of an artist. Thus, he began a period of transition, in which he moved back and forth between the United States and Taiwan three times.⁷

1979 was also the devastating year when the United States severed official diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan).⁸ In Hsu’s notes from September 18, 1986 (See plate, P.27), he compared himself to “a fish that had already been fried and then got released into the sea.” He then wrote, “The fleeing, emigration, anxiety, and political struggle that this generation of Chinese has been through...few people have given thought to what ‘immigration’ really means. If you join white society, you may get money, you may get a house. The previous generation will become a sacrifice, the next generation will melt into white society. They will feel yellow, but they will want to be white.” In the bottom right corner of this page in his notebook, who drew the shape of the United States, with three kinds of people in it: white, red, and black. In other words, from the time he first moved to the United States in 1979 to when he wrote these notes in 1986, Hsu may have originally wanted to immigrate to the US because he sensed the upheaval of the times (the state of politics and foreign relations in Taiwan), but after years of experience, his American dream had gradually turned into disillusionment.

During his time in the United States, Hsu worked as a porter and jewelry designer and salesman. The hardships of migrant work and the instability of life limited his artistic output to mainly small, monochrome drawings in sketchbooks. The 1980 technical-pen drawing NY Building, as well as Mystification and Myths of a Block City and My Passport Is Seeking My Photo, are all filled with a sense of alienation from the big city of New York and a bewildered questioning of his own place in it. His manner of drawing in this period was mainly to form the shapes he wanted with multiple layers of short, dotted lines.

Returning to Taiwan, the Waishuangxi Years, Becoming a Full-time Artist (1989-2007)

After returning to Taiwan with his wife and son, Hsu Yu-Jen took a job in Taipei’s Waishuangxi District, as security guard of Hangu Community where the sculptor Ju Ming (1938-2023) lived. In his free time, he would get together with some friends to carve stones—Hsiao Chang-Cheng (a graduate of the National Taiwan Academy of Arts sculpture program), the painters Cheng Tsai-Tung (1953) and Yu Peng (1955-2014), the sculptor Hsiao Yi (1956-2006), and the photographer Yu Wei-Te. Ju Ming would also sometimes join the group, who called themselves the “Shuangxi Gang.”

Through an introduction by Cheng Tsai-Tung and Yu Peng, the explosive, original art of Hsu Yu-Jen came to the attention of Johnson Chang (Chang Tsong-Zung), the director of Hanart TZ gallery in Hong Kong. At that point, Hsu started his career as a professional artist, with Chang’s facilitation, participating in many contemporary art exhibitions in Taipei and Hong Kong. In 1994, the touring exhibition “Man and Earth: Contemporary Paintings from Taiwan,” which Chang curated, introduced the works of four painters— Cheng Tsai-Tung, Yu Peng, Kuo Chuan-Chiu, and Hsu Yu-Jen—to the United States.⁹ This exhibition was significant, because for first time, four newly emerging, stylistically original Taiwanese artists were presented in the United States with the description “Contemporary Paintings from Taiwan” (rather than the Cold War-era term “Free China”). Of all of Hsu’s oil paintings in the exhibition, the most striking was A Self-Portrait Standing amid a Pile of Stones, now in the collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. (See plate, P.139) In the essay “Memories and Extensions of the Salt Zone: On the Paintings of Hsu Yu-Jen,” written for Hsu’s 2006 solo exhibition at Sincewell Gallery in Kaohsiung, I commented:

In this work, he transforms himself into a statue half-buried in a pot like a bonsai.¹⁰ His obstinate yet determined eyes do not gaze directly at the viewer, but look sideways, ahead and over to the right. The body underneath the head is presented as a geometric plane, resembling a hand puppet, or perhaps a cruciform. The images of the flowing ocean, the rough gravel (or oyster shells) glittering in the sunlight seem to indifferently bear witness to his petrified body. Whether it’s a puppet or the metaphor of a cross, this self-portrait with severed hands and feet hints at bondage and helplessness in the real world. Perhaps the only thing that fights back is the obstinate soul conveyed through those determined eyes.¹¹

In fact, A Self-Portrait Standing amid a Pile of Stones was based on an earlier draft drawn with a ballpoint pen (See plate, P.28), from the Facebook page of Chang Jin Lieng]. In the exhibition “Man and Earth: Contemporary Paintings from Taiwan,” Hsu’s oil paintings (with the exception of A Self-Portrait Standing amid a Pile of Stones) were all made with sticky, heavy short brushstrokes and dark color tones—for example, Ramshackle House (1992), Warm Red House and a Red Chimney (1993), and City (1993). In terms of composition, they were divided into small segments to convey an inner sense of alienation and separation. In interesting contrast, in 1993 he also created a series of large-scale ink paintings (218 x 81 cm), which took on the embryonic form of what would later be his Fine Brush Ink Painting series. The three ink works included in the catalogue for “Man and Earth” depict the three subjects of stars, the moon and the sun using lines of ink similar to pencil drawings.

The exhibition “Tracing Taiwan: Contemporary Works on Paper,” curated by Alice Yang (1961-1997), opened on June 17, 1997 at The Drawing Center in New York, featuring four Taiwanese contemporary artists—Hsu Yu-Jen, Hou Chun-Ming, Yu Peng, and Huang Chih-Yang.¹⁴ The exhibition included Hsu’s highly representative work A Small Window to Look at the Sky. (See plate, P.180) This work depicts a brick house where he once lived as a boy, in his hometown in southern Taiwan. The house is shaped like an inverted triangle, drawn with a dry brush and slender, short lines on white paper with no background. Both the inverted triangular composition and the gradually crumbling, fragmentary structure suggest that the old brick house is about to collapse. This kind of composition with a sense of instability and imagery alluding to the impending disintegration of some existing form have long been the form of painting at which Hsu excels. Another of his works in the exhibition, The Mountains Have No More Trees, The Mountains Have No More Flowers, The Mountains Have No More Grass, The Mountains Have No More Water (1996)(See plate, P.184), expressed in its title a sense of apprehension and anger about the condition of the forests, soil and water following the “economic miracle” Taiwan had just experienced.

In fact, between 1970 and 1980 a dispute between “modernism and local realism” swept through Taiwanese literature and art. Hsu’s move to the United States in 1979 may be interpreted as seeking to “completely” devote himself to European and American modernism, but he did not do this. The first and most obvious reason is that he did not keep making art while he was in the US. But in addition, after he returned to Taiwan from America, he did not entirely abandon Taiwanese traditions and realism in his choice of subject matter. For example, his 1989 series Self-portrait as a Primordial Embryo/Cosmic Vortex seem to have been inspired by Lee Chun-Shan’s automatic painting techniques, but they also seem quite similar to the cut-and-paste ceramic works of Jintang Temple in Tainan’s Jiali District, which Hsu has called the art museum of his childhood.¹⁵ (See plate, P.29) If, as per Freudian theory, automatic painting can be used to dig out the subconscious or childhood memories, then Self-portrait as a Primordial Embryo/Cosmic Vortex may perhaps be understood as one of Hsu’s artistic archetypes.

Sojourn in Beijing and Mourning the Loss of a Child

At the end of 2006, through the financial support of a Taiwanese art patron named Mr. Chang, Hsu accepted a residency at Changdian Village (“Changdian Base”) on the outskirts of Beijing, where he shared a studio with another artist from Taiwan, Huang Chih-Yang.(See plate, P.30) According to my impression, Hsu had already begun creating his “Rough Brush” series—paintings on fully unrolled pieces of xuan paper, with compositions as minimalist as possible, done with simple (rough) brushstrokes, reminiscent of the lotuses of Bada Shanren (1626-1705). Works of this variety may seem simple, but they had an extremely high failure rate. That is, Hsu would complete a stack of paintings, then he would re-examine the whole batch and eliminate those he found unsatisfactory. His Rough-brush Ink Painting Series No. 45 (2007) (See plate, P.265), featured in this exhibition, was completed in Beijing.

Unexpectedly, at the end of 2007, when Hsu was still working in Beijing, tragic news arrived from Taiwan—his and Chang Jin Lieng’s only child had passed away at their home. This unexpected blow gave the couple an inner torment beyond the comprehension of others, and it cast a great shroud over his later works. In retrospect, 2007, when Hsu was in Beijing, was the year his creative energy exploded. From 2006 to his return to Taiwan in October 2008, he lived in a huge factory (studio) in the Beijing suburb of Changdian Village. Although another Taiwanese artist, Huang Chih-Yang, was also there as his companion, the two were busy with their artistic endeavors and seem to have interacted little. Without friends to drink and socialize with, as he had done in Taiwan, Hsu was basically able to come to grips with his own solitude and concentrate on his art in Beijing. Thus, he completed many large-scale oil paintings and ink paintings during this period. Works in this exhibition that Hsu completed in Beijing include the large-scale ink painting Thick Brush Painting, Skyscraper Series (369 x 145cm) (See plate, P.254-255) , displayed in Gallery 206, as well as the oil paintings Flower and Boat (300 x 180 cm) (See plate, P.283) and Color Painting Series No. 5 (240 x 100cm) (See plate, P.289) . In the photograph (See plate, P.30), which I took, Hsu can be seen standing with a look of contemplation in front of a study for Flower and Boat, while a study for Color Painting Series No. 5 is to the left on a wooden bench behind him.

Self-doubt and a Fresh Start

Hsu Yu-Jen returned to Taiwan from Beijing in 2008, but for a long time afterwards, he could not recover from the agonizing grief over the loss of his son. Recalling that time, he says he often remained alone. And he found himself incapable of creating any more works in his commercially successful Fine Brush Landscape series. “When I create a fine brush landscape, my mind must enter a settled state,” he says, “but often in the midst of painting, my tears would flow, and I would start sobbing.” This state of affairs lasted for about four to five years. Then in 2012, he held a solo exhibition, “Between Coarse and Fine Brushworks,” at Taipei National University of the Arts’ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. Between 2012 and 2022, Hsu faced many pressures, both internal and external: in addition to grieving his departed son, he also fell into a period of self-doubt. Since he could not enter the proper state of mind for fine brush painting, he continued producing his Rough Brush series. Meanwhile, at his studio in Yuanshanding, he began to experiment with new methods, including rubbing charcoal pencils on his canvases. In the documentary “Far From Home,” he says, “The readymade charcoal pencils you buy in the store are ‘dead’. Their black color never varies. But the charcoal I burn myself has more layers of black, because I use different kinds of wood.”

In 2014, Hsu’s close friend Yu Peng passed away from liver cancer. This was yet another tragedy that deeply saddened him. After all, the two of them had been “sculpting stones” together since his Waishuangxi period of the 1980s and could be described as brothers who stuck together through thick and thin. After Yu Peng’s death, Hsu had less contact with the world. He even almost completely stopped visiting his old haunt on Yongkang Street, the Guanhe Antiquities Shop, run by his friend Fa Ge. In 2015, Hsu was invited to teach ink painting at Taipei National University of the Arts. Later, he signed an agency agreement with Chini Gallery in Taipei’s Neihu District, a relationship that continues to today.

Over the past 16 years since 2008, Hsu’s wounds have gradually healed, and his art has clearly experienced rejuvenation. During the process, he experimented with several new materials and methods: for example, his Color Ink Painting on Tofu Pallet Series No. 22 (2018) (See plate, P.298) or his Shapeless No. 20 (2021), painted with charcoal, acrylic and glue on plastic sheeting (See plate, P.317). Hsu’s frugal personality (or his “environmental awareness”) has led him to prefer using discarded materials, such as painting frames, canvases, xuan paper that his wife Chang Jin Lieng has already written on, or paint or brushes his students no longer want. Many of his works of this period have an “experimental” spirit, and quite a few cannot be exhibited publicly, because of difficulties preserving them. For example, he has sometimes rubbed coarse grains of charcoal on used canvases, and even though he has fixed them with resin, they have still fallen off.

On August 20, 2022, I visited Hsu Yu-Jen at his home on the north coast of Taiwan. The next day, I wrote on Facebook:

After a simple lunch, he took me to a space on the third floor, and with the help of his wife Jin Lieng, he showed me a 20-meter-long scroll of calligraphy he had made a while before in Penghu. As he pulled it out, Jin Lieng unrolled the handscroll at the bottom. The two of them seemed to be very much in sync. One can scarcely imagine the storms their marriage has weathered. The most severe was the loss of their son in 2007. Over the years, this lifelong heartache has always lingered like a nightmare in the minds of the couple, even encumbering Hsu Yu-Jen’s art in recent years. He himself described it as “a pain that can’t be hidden away.” I asked him why he had stopped doing his fine brush paintings. He replied, “I get halfway done, and the tears start falling…because the year my son passed away, I had been painting a whole Fine Brush series for a gallery in Hong Kong.” He continued, “I’m finished with the Fine Brush series. Even though plenty of people want to buy them, that series has already reached its peak, and I don’t want to paint it anymore.”

After we looked at the scroll, we drove over to his studio in Yuanshanding. There, we casually chatted, drinking his nearly flavorless pu’er tea (the weakest pu’er I’ve ever tasted in my life). Then, he showed me several of his early oil paintings, as well as his most recent works, painted on plastic sheeting, and calligraphy on xuan paper his wife Jin Lieng had written on and didn’t want to keep, which he wrote over the top of like a palimpsest. On the paper was burnt charcoal, with a few characters repeated over and over. I know he is missing that son who is up in heaven, still doing tattoos.¹⁶

In 2023, at the Hengshan Calligraphy Art Center held the exhibition “Era of Principle and No Principle Interwoven: Calligraphy as a Visual Form,” featuring the long scroll mentioned above, Billows from the Island’s End, Waves of Dry Ink Writing, which was suspended in the air. (See plate, P.314-315) It is worth adding that this work of calligraphy should be seen as a hybrid of conceptual calligraphy and performance art. First, the material Hsu used was a roll of xuan paper that a friend did not want and gave to him at the end of an art event, which he later wrote calligraphy on with a red plastic paintbrush that he found and re-used, plus some cheap ink. A large part of this 2,580-centimeter-long work is made of images approaching doodling, combined with some words. The content of the words have to do with his son. I believe that when he finished this work, his emotional catharsis (his dialogue with his son) was complete. And for this reason, it is not appropriate to assess this work according to the ink and brushwork techniques of “calligraphy.” Long ago, in his days at National Taiwan Academy of Arts, Hsu Yu-Jen had declared his departure from the “precision of brush and ink” of the traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy system.

Conclusion

Having known Hsu Yu-Jen well for many years, I offer the following observations in conclusion:

(1) He is full of contradictions and conflicts. His art is built on the inner pull of his own life. His need to create can make him extremely self-centered. This has brought suffering to the family members around him.

(2) He developed his Fine Brush and Rough Brush painting series simultaneously. The two series have highly contrasting styles, reflecting the duality of his personality.

(3) The formal vocabulary in his paintings is both “organic” (e.g., flowers, grass, egg shapes) and “geometric” (e.g., high-rise buildings in New York). He often juxtaposes the two. The organic forms are often slightly chaotic, approximating archetypes of his inner life, while his geometric forms, as seen in Little Window to the Sky, reveal a rational, cautious structural layering.

(4) In his oil paintings, he often relies on intuition and memory. For example, when depicting flowers, he tends to show their stems bent. He has said this is an expression of his fond recollections of his grandmother’s rickety body, and also a manifestation of the indomitable power of life. Yet in his large-scale ink paintings (fully unrolled scrolls or paintings longer than three meters), the blank spaces, the geometric shapes formed by slender lines, and the angles at which his straight lines bend seem to be the result of meticulous calculation and deliberation.

(5) He has always scorned the core aesthetic values of the mainstream and has felt content to reside in the margins. It is hard to imagine that the artists he admires most are the Song Dynasty Emperor Huizong (1082-1135) and the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock (1912-1952). Emperor Huizong’s aesthetic of beauty and precision may not be easy to detect in Hsu’s impasto oil paintings, but Huizong’s pronounced visual exactitude is reflected in the detailed way Hsu’s lines move in his large-scale Fine Brush Landscape series, and the relationship between his shapes and blank spaces.

(6) The images and texts in Hsu’s notebooks are the most intimate and sincere glimpses into his inner life. Much of the text reveals existential questions: “Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going?” In a Facebook post, his wife Chang Jin Lieng revealed, “It was because of these words and what they said that I fell in love with him.”¹⁷ In this exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, some of Hsu’s notes, painting tools and charcoal pencils have been placed in a display case, in a manner reminiscent of an archaeological dig, which is quite a meaningful gesture.

Since graduating from the Chinese painting program at National Taiwan Academy of Arts, Hsu Yu-Jen has been making art for a half a century. His creative thinking, like the clothes he wears, is never mainstream, but dwells in a detached state. Quite obviously, the instructions in “Chinese painting” he received in the academic art system did not lead him down the path of superficially depicting “the mists and smoke of temple offerings” or “birds and beasts.” His desire for and questions about creativity could only be pursued through Western art. Although his three-time sojourn in the United States was a big challenge to his married life, the Western art he beheld there greatly nourished his soul. Lee Chun-Shan’s heuristic teaching, whether it was “automatic” techniques or rejecting imitation, shaped how Hsu searched within himself for the archetypes and the essence of life. Through his raw and unrestrained style of oil painting and his simultaneous exploration of his Fine Brush and Rough Brush ink painting series, he gradually established a place for himself in the Taiwanese art world. His slender, broken lines, whether painted on paper or silk, feel like sewn threads or resemble sunlight refracted off a salt flat.

If we consider Hsu’s subject matter, one oft-visited theme is flowers, appearing either alone or in groups of three or four, and always appealing to the instinctive power of life.¹⁸ Many of his Fine Brush Landscapes are fractured compositions (of mountains and streams) that, in combination with his idiomatic poetry, stand as indictments of the wanton destruction of Taiwan’s mountains and forests by greedy people. The powerful visual oppressiveness of New York’s skyscrapers must have immensely impacted Hsu when he lived there, and images of these buildings are reflected in many of his large-scale ink compositions—presenting a geometrical, structural modern aesthetic. If his flowers are organic forms that suggest life, then his abstract structures (derived from skyscrapers) are forms bespeaking modernity. In reality, compared with the creation of these external forms, Hsu’s private notes possess more primal power and hold more secrets. If it weren’t for this retrospective at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, these words and images might have been sealed away forever in a corner of Hsu’s home in southern Taiwan, awaiting death and obliteration. To display these original documents from his innermost depths is an act of self-exposure. Unlike those who taught him traditional Chinese painting, the artist Hsu Yu-Jen does not have the image of an exemplary teacher who is widely hailed and respected; his naked honesty about life is rare in the history of Taiwanese or ethnic Chinese modern art. Breaking away from tradition was his most important means to march toward modernity.

Notes:

1. James Cahill, The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1982)

2. Hsu relates that his graduation project received a failing grade from his teacher. However, due to the advocacy of Hung Jui-Lin (1912-1996), Hsu was eventually allowed to graduate. The painting The Grades My Teacher Gave Me, featured in “Hsu Yu-Jen: A Retrospective” at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, depicts the shape of a duck egg, reflecting the travails he faced in graduating.

3. Taiwan Panorama magazine: https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/Articles/Details?Guid=2b8e3e6d-9ace-4b64-bf09-6d3a381a60ec&CatId=8&postname=%E5%B1%B1%E5%AF%A8%E5%9C%8B%E5%AF%B6%EF%BC%8C%E4%BB%BF%E5%8F%A4%E5%A8%9B%E4%BB%8A

4. For more information on how Lee Chun-Shan used automatic painting techniques to induce creativity in his students, see: Tseng Chang-Sheng, 臺灣美術評論全集：李仲生卷 (“A Complete Collection of Taipei Fine Art Reviews: Lee Chun-Shan”) (Taipei: Artist, 1999), pp. 82-84. The author notes: “To eliminate these stumbling blocks, the first technique he taught his students was automatic writing, through which beginners could gradually discover the unique world of imagery in their own subconscious.”

5. Most of the time Hsu is not particular about his choice of painting materials. I have learned from interviews over the years that he is not the kind of painter who strives for “meticulous brushwork.” In his “Fine Brush” paintings exhibited in Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s “Hsu Yu-Jen: A Retrospective,” brushes, technical pens and ballpoint pens have all been employed.

6. The American Cultural Center, located at the intersection of Nanhai Road and Quanzhou Street in Taipei City, is now the National 228 Memorial Museum. For more on the United States Information Agency’s Cold War influence on Taiwan’s literature and arts, see: Chen Man-hua, “Impact of the West: Taiwanese Modern Art and American Cultural Exchange in 1950-1960s,” Taiwan Historical Research, (Taipei) vol. 24, no. 2 (2017), pp. 121-127.

7. According to an explanation by Hsu Yu-Jen, “Hsu met Hsi Te-Chin through an introduction from his friend Jason Kuo (Kuo Shao Tsung). Hsi Te-Chin and Chen Ting-Shi went to see Hsu’s works, and Hsi told Hsu about the American Cultural Center’s system for organizing exhibitions. He said that if he was selected for an exhibition, he could apply for an artist visa to the USA. At that time, appraisals were conducted twice a year, with both Taiwanese and foreign judges. According to the rules, Hsu had to prepare 12 slides of his works to take part in the appraisal. Only after being selected and holding an exhibition could he apply for an artist visa to the US, based on his exhibition record.” The above information was provided by Hsuan-Chun Lin of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum exhibition department, who contacted the artist.

8. At that time, I was still a student at the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University. Around the time that the United States announced its severance of diplomatic ties with the R.O.C., a long queue of people formed along Xinyi Road in front of the American Institute in Taiwan, seeking to apply for visas to the United States.

9. Chang Tsong-Zung, Man and Earth:Contemporary Paintings from Taiwan (Denver: The Asian Art Coordinating Council, 1994)

10. According to the artist, his father was fond of cultivating bonsai trees, and this work also addressed his relationship with his father.

11. Philip Wu Chao-Jen, “鹽分地帶的記憶與延伸─論許雨仁的繪畫創作” (“Memories and Extensions of the Salt Zone: On the Paintings of Hsu Yu-Jen”) (2006), unpublished.

12. According to the artist’s own oral statement, this work is his most important self-portrait: “In front of the pot are four sprigs of grass (representing life force). The pot is covered with stones (because there is no soil), and I have no hands. Behind me is a piece of wood that my body is tied to, in a way much like how my father used to bind and shape his bonsai.”

13. See: Chang Tsong-Zung, Man and Earth:Contemporary Paintings from Taiwan (Denver: The Asian Art Coordinating Council, 1994).

14. The curator of this exhibition, Alice Yang, tragically passed away in a car accident in New York during the Chinese New Year season in 1997. “Tracing Taiwan:Contemporary Works on Paper” had its grand opening on June 17, 1997 at The Drawing Center in New York with the help of family and friends. In 1999, through the joint efforts of Alice Yang’s mother Shuhwa Chou Yang and her eldest brother Andrew Yang, “Tracing Taiwan:Contemporary Works on Paper” was held again at Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

15. In Hsu Yu-Jen’s own words, Jintang Temple in Tainan’s Jiali District was “the art museum where I was born.” See the documentary film “鄉關何處：所在-許雨仁” (“Far from Home: Dwelling Place—Hsu Yu-Jen”), part of the Mnews television series “Art Echo,” 1’48”.

16. Quoted from the author’s Facebook page, Aug. 20, 2022.

17. Quoted from Chang Jin Lieng’s Facebook page, May 21, 2023.

18. In Hsu Yu-Jen’s artworks, objects often appear in sets of four, such as compositions of four flowers. He told me that in his mind, “one” represents birth, “two and three” represent a process, and “four” represents death. Thus, he refers to the process of birth and death, like the one that occurs in our environment.