Hsu’s practice spans ink painting, oil painting, mixed media, and calligraphy. Rooted in brush-and-ink mastery, his work embraces experimental concepts to redefine the language of contemporary ink art. Positioned within the broader trajectory of ink’s modernization, Hsu has established a singular and rigorous creative path that secures his place in both contemporary art and art history.
Chang Tsong-Zung Independent Curator, Guest Professor of China Academy of Art (Hangzhou, China), and Director of Hanart TZ Gallery(Hong Kong)
Reading the art of Hsu Yu-Jen always triggers a frisson of surprise—how strange that his forms can be constructed that way, how unfathomable wherefrom his ideas might arise.
As we look back on this half-century of wonders, we might want to bypass how these works have emerged, and instead shine a spotlight on the life of the painter himself. From his first tentative scribbling, we already seem to see maturity vaguely taking shape. In fact, from when his art first appeared out of thin air, moving through its logical permutations, the random connections among many different phases of life and the shambolic thoughts surfacing in his mind have always arisen from the inexplicable magic of the artist’s life. A reading of Hsu Yu-Jen’s inspirations and art must start from the beginning of his career.
Looking at his early material, I was surprised by the absence of any copying of master works. From the outset, when first learning to paint, Hsu Yu-Jen seems to have insisted on setting himself apart from his predecessors. To sever ties with those who came before is certainly the calling of the modernist. And the method that has distinguished him from his predecessors is his decades-long practice of line drawing.
During his university days, Hsu chose to learn from a mentor outside of his school—a modernist emigre from the Mainland, Lee Chun-Shan. When we speak of Hsu Yu-Jen’s “innovation,” it begins with the line drawings that he inherited from Lee Chun-Shan’s abstract techniques. Line drawing, as Hsu learned from Master Lee, dispenses with “brushwork” that is associated with traditional painting, and liberates the artist to explore new forms. The liberating effect of drawing is that it needs no justification. The act of drawing is itself reason enough. Unlike “brushwork,” a form of expressive writing that comes with a rich history, line drawing intimates an exploratory approach to picture making. The painter may treat the blank plane of a piece of paper as a frontier to be discovered; he may wander with his brush in search of a new world. As the mind follows the path of the brush, the shapes can be secondary to the tactile sense of the line; shapes can come into being as tentatively as the painter wishes to spread them across the sheet. Thus, in line drawings one cannot tell whether the visual forms are discovered through “random” logic or arise from familiar but vague memories incubating in the painter’s mind.
There is no such thing as creation. All you can do is repeat what already exists. When my hand starts to move, when I paint, I come to life. Now when I look at people, they seem to be assembled piece by piece.”(From Journal of Hsu Yu-Jen in the 1980s)
Looking back at the history of ink painting, we see that Hsu Yu-Jen has had an upbringing quite far removed from the old literati tradition, even far removed from the spirit of the 1950s, when fervent debates over the identity of Chinese versus Western culture raged in Taiwan. The cultural atmosphere in which Hsu grew up owed more to the intellectual movements of post-World War II Europe, where young people embraced contemporary ideas such as existentialism, which grew out of the devastations of war, and resisted Cold War ideologies. Nihilism’s focus on radical individualism, emphasizing the struggle to stand up from the ruins of war on one’s own, was more the type of thinking that appealed to Hsu’s generation. This included radical self-questioning and resolutely building a new self that not only deviated from the Confucian-Taoist worldview, but also differed from the visions of a new culture that swept China following the May Fourth Movement after World War I.
A bird flew past holding a seed in its mouth / Without noticing, it dropped / There / It hatched a crack / Of struggle. (Hsu Yu-Jen, 1991)
In Trees and Stones, which Hsu completed in 1975, the same year he graduated from the National Taiwan Academy of Arts, a large tree trunk occupies the center of the xuan paper, standing erect and monumental, spreading branches left and right. Hsu might have failed his Chinese painting course, but it didn’t appear to have dented the painter’s self-confidence. From 1973 to 1980, his main series of works—Automatic Sketches, Invisible, and all manner of different self-portraits—still showed him to be groping for forms that had yet to solidify, but already they sent a strong message of the search for a sense of his own existence. His self-portrait is a subject he would subsequently revisit time and again. A key interest during this period of growth was the critical assessment of Chinese traditional art, and exploration of the culture of landscape art on his own terms.
Hsu’s Automatic Sketches, completed the year he graduated from the Academy of Arts, and the series I Frolic in Nature and the Cosmos (1973-75) were meandering, abstract line paintings that took shape under the guidance of Lee Chun-Shan. As though he was watching his own unconsciousness emerging from the void of white paper, Hsu gropingly brought forth artworks as if he were walking through the undergrowth of a forest or gazing at stars in the cosmos. The lines, flowing smoothly with ethereal forms, reveal that Hsu had been wandering the realm of landscape painting from the outset, even though the sense of his own presence in the world belonged to the post-industrial era. His criticism of and visceral feelings about the times he lived in went hand in hand with his painting. On the other hand, the inspired poetry that accompanied his paintings should be read in the tradition of poetic colophons on old paintings: Sometimes he lamented fate, and sometimes he criticized modern society; he would question the nature of life and being, or reflect on environmental issues.
An ID card, for example, is also one’s own "being." (Hsu Yu-Jen, 1982)
Apart from family and friends, Hsu’s sense of existence is built around his feelings for nature and its myriad plants and animals. When he was growing up, Hsu was fortunate to live in an era just before rapid urbanization. He grew up along the seaside of Tainan, where city and countryside mingled. He learned about fishing and farming on the periphery of industrial society, and he cherished the atmosphere of a form of life which lagged behind modern times. His advocacy of environmental protection does not arise from abstract knowledge. His resistance to the transformation of humanity by modernity is based on the good fortune of a memory of growing up with a different way of life.
The land is meant to be loved / Flowers are meant for liberating yourself / Now there are only the remnants of flowers / And wasteland (Inscription by Hsu Yu-Jen, 2007)
In his early works, Hsu Yu-Jen swung back and forth between two different subject matters: One was abstract line drawings with astrological images of the movement of stars through the cosmos. Another subject was small geometric forms being repeated in the empty space of a blank sheet; he would stack up repeating units that resemble small bricks, building them up in layers until they take shape along a horizon. The heavens and the human world were completely divided. The journals he kept during the years when he held a series of day jobs—especially when he was studying and living alone in the United States—are full of notes about how modern life divides up working hours and architectural masses into systems of units. “Every day, I just move from one cubicle to another,” he wrote. However, “when I wake up, the sun is still so bright outside my window, then I feel how completely unfamiliar this place is, as if I have arrived somewhere where the mountains seem to be climbing up a wall.” (From Journal of Hsu Yu-Jen, June 1982). For Hsu Yu-Jen, modern life was no different from the fate of Sisyphus.
Immediately after graduating from art school in 1975, Hsu entered the workforce, where he gained a deep-set feeling that modern life was an assembly of components and that people were the components being assembled. The oil paintings he made in the 1980s, after returning from a period living in the United States, reflected this feeling most profoundly. He would fill cities, people, plants, everything, with tiny rectangular cells, including the open sky beyond the manmade world.
He is a person who admires nature, keeping his eye on the horizon. With this firm ground under his feet, he does not care how much the world spins, and he is the kind of person who can keep standing upright amidst the whirling torrents of circumstance. He senses the elements of human society that are stacked up from the ground will inevitably be melded back into heaven and earth; even the ideal order of geometry will inevitably be washed away by the force of mountains and rivers. He is the sort who knows that all the shapes formed by repetitive units, including the sense of existence achieved with industry, must ultimately be subsumed within the natural landscape with its spinning earth and shifting stars.
Hsu Yu-Jen positions his art within the context of landscape painting. He loves the salty marshes and fish farms and the sparkling oceans that nurtured him. But today everything he sees around him is gradually transforming into concrete buildings and mounds of garbage. Routine forms of expression are inadequate to convey what he is experiencing before his own eyes. He uses painting as a process of exploration through which to discover the world and to test, even verify, himself in the here and now. To find a new navigation route that matches his own perception and to enjoy the happiness of creative vitality, he has been obliged to invent new techniques. However, crucially, from the very beginning Hsu decided to use fundamental, traditional tools, and also to follow intuitive paths of art-making.
I want to rediscover the primitive way of painting. Modern and classical techniques always moved forward through means of false embellishment. I, on the other hand, want to travel backward one step at a time. (From Journal of Hsu Yu-Jen, 1980s)
Hsu Yu-Jen often constructs his scenes using geometric shapes and lines. But triangles, squares and circles are not organic. Geometry is a set of idealized laws hidden in Nature, and yet idealized geometric forms stand precisely on the obverse side of constantly changing Nature. In this way landscapes bespeak of eternity yet also allude to oblivion. But of course, the cycle of life and death is also the law of the nature of heaven.
Hsu chooses to use broken lines of thin brushstrokes for his brush paintings. It is for him a special method that helps him to go beyond the parameters of the “brush.” The “line,” geometrically, is the intersection of two planes, without the presence of any volume. By employing thin brushstrokes, but also making his brushstrokes ubiquitously porous through the use of broken lines, Hsu renders his landscapes bright and translucent, crystalline and fluid. He does not ignore the traditional texturing and cadence of ink, but is always aware that his own style lies “outside” the techniques of traditional texturing and ink-washing. He also discovered that the interplay of light and shadow could replace the cadence of ink, and that his short thin brushstrokes could express the textures and substance of rocks and mountains equally well.
From the time Hsu first started his “thin-brush” ink paintings, he was also making his “rough brush” ink paintings in parallel. He has used both approaches for similar themes, except that his “rough brush” works are usually more impetuous. In recent years he has created a new kind of “text painting,” giving full play to his rough-brush calligraphy at a large scale, exaggerating the symbolic quality of his pictorial words and writing with bold, dry strokes, often using geometrically shaped characters. He arranges his words on his xuan paper like objects floating in outer space. They look as though they come from the beyond, like Taoist or shamanistic magical writing used for summoning the spirits.
From the standpoint of classical calligraphy, Hsu’s writing would understandably be dismissed. His characters defy classification—they are neither seal script nor cursive. He has no calligraphic mode, but he does have a method of composition. He has no spatial relationship between individual characters, but he does control their positioning to achieve a coherent pictorial composition. From a historical perspective, his texts belong to the kind of writing that has long existed outside the official history of calligraphy, just as his landscapes lie outside traditional ink painting. When we say “outside” the official history of calligraphy, we mean writing that has not been properly documented in the history of literati calligraphy and officialdom. Herein lies “calligraphic” writings used for communicating with the vast world of gods, witches and immortals: praying for souls, supplicating to heaven, praying for ancestors, exorcising demons—all these efforts to contact the spiritual world in China have historically been done through writing. Hsu’s freely executed calligraphic writings, rendered with a dry brush, float like prayer flags, like sutras flapping in the wilderness. They provoke the uncanny feeling of a book of spells with inexplicable power.
Text-as-landscape originates from a primal exploration of the blank space within a sheet of paper, starting from pursuing the form of a line, from asking why you are here in the world. Hsu Yu-Jen’s paintings have always been filled with yearning and questioning. His pictures and texts form an internal dialogue with each other. The free-standing large characters in the blank sheets that take the place of images of mountains and rivers may not be diagrams of Taoist cosmology, but still they convey the magnificence of landscapes.
In Chinese, a landscape is known as shan-shui, literally “mountain-water.” And a “mountain-water” landscape is a “mountain-water world”: each painting comprises an entire world, not just the world from one point of view. Hsu Yu-Jen’s early abstract depictions of the cosmos always remained hidden in his later landscape paintings, which viewed the world and shan-shui from a cosmic perspective.
When one paints landscapes with a cosmological vision, even a painting of a single flower is different from other pictures of flowers, because this flower is not one object, but the entirety of heaven and earth. In a 2013 hanging scroll with a thin-brush painting of flowers, Hsu blended the floral subject and the background into one harmonious whole. The sky seems to be filled with flying wisps or fine dust. Huge flowers are depicted in fragmentary lines that cover the whole paper to the point of being indiscernible, with brushstrokes as light as a dragonfly touching the surface of a pond. One cannot tell if it is a flower, a leaf, floating powder, silken threads, insects in flight or a starry sky—it is all a primordial chaos of great bright light.
Both his oil paintings of urban life filled with tiny components and his panoramic ink paintings in which the air is filled with fine cells of dust convey Hsu’s macrocosmic view of the world. Heaven and earth are not divided by any gap, but are as one. When we view his early dark, dense cityscapes alongside his landscapes that contain large areas of blank space, we understand that for Hsu Yu-Jen, leaving blank space is a technique of realism, expressing the close interconnection between the myriad forms of the material world and nothingness, being transformed into an atmosphere or a vague glimmer that fills the universe.
It is difficult to imagine a world “outside nature.” Humankind and the heavens have intermingled since ancient times; the two have never severed ties absolutely. Things built by humankind are never airtight. There will always be cracks, and from these cracks flowers and plants will grow. Hsu Yu-Jen is a natural force of vitality that has grown from such a crevice and, through unaccountable moments of serendipity, has been nurtured to become the painter Hsu Yu-Jen. Upon the living firmament that he has re-created with his art he now firmly stands.
When I first saw the salt fens as a child / The gleam from the surface of the water burned into my heart / Walking through the scalding sand dunes/ The salty sticky sea breeze/ Passing through the enigmatic motherly ironwood forest/ The dazzling flat blue distance / …The semicircular sea / Kissing the sky / From that moment on, the sea had awakened me / ... No matter what mood I’m in, I want to go to the sea! I’ve swum underwater through scenes like paintings from ancient times / Now, with a small brush, with slow, slender lines / I write and paint “I who belong to the sea.” (Hsu Yu-Jen, 2004)
Reading Hsu Yu-Jen
Reading the art of Hsu Yu-Jen always triggers a frisson of surprise—how strange that his forms can be constructed that way, how unfathomable wherefrom his ideas might arise.
As we look back on this half-century of wonders, we might want to bypass how these works have emerged, and instead shine a spotlight on the life of the painter himself. From his first tentative scribbling, we already seem to see maturity vaguely taking shape. In fact, from when his art first appeared out of thin air, moving through its logical permutations, the random connections among many different phases of life and the shambolic thoughts surfacing in his mind have always arisen from the inexplicable magic of the artist’s life. A reading of Hsu Yu-Jen’s inspirations and art must start from the beginning of his career.
Looking at his early material, I was surprised by the absence of any copying of master works. From the outset, when first learning to paint, Hsu Yu-Jen seems to have insisted on setting himself apart from his predecessors. To sever ties with those who came before is certainly the calling of the modernist. And the method that has distinguished him from his predecessors is his decades-long practice of line drawing.
During his university days, Hsu chose to learn from a mentor outside of his school—a modernist emigre from the Mainland, Lee Chun-Shan. When we speak of Hsu Yu-Jen’s “innovation,” it begins with the line drawings that he inherited from Lee Chun-Shan’s abstract techniques. Line drawing, as Hsu learned from Master Lee, dispenses with “brushwork” that is associated with traditional painting, and liberates the artist to explore new forms. The liberating effect of drawing is that it needs no justification. The act of drawing is itself reason enough. Unlike “brushwork,” a form of expressive writing that comes with a rich history, line drawing intimates an exploratory approach to picture making. The painter may treat the blank plane of a piece of paper as a frontier to be discovered; he may wander with his brush in search of a new world. As the mind follows the path of the brush, the shapes can be secondary to the tactile sense of the line; shapes can come into being as tentatively as the painter wishes to spread them across the sheet. Thus, in line drawings one cannot tell whether the visual forms are discovered through “random” logic or arise from familiar but vague memories incubating in the painter’s mind.
There is no such thing as creation. All you can do is repeat what already exists. When my hand starts to move, when I paint, I come to life. Now when I look at people, they seem to be assembled piece by piece.”(From Journal of Hsu Yu-Jen in the 1980s)
Looking back at the history of ink painting, we see that Hsu Yu-Jen has had an upbringing quite far removed from the old literati tradition, even far removed from the spirit of the 1950s, when fervent debates over the identity of Chinese versus Western culture raged in Taiwan. The cultural atmosphere in which Hsu grew up owed more to the intellectual movements of post-World War II Europe, where young people embraced contemporary ideas such as existentialism, which grew out of the devastations of war, and resisted Cold War ideologies. Nihilism’s focus on radical individualism, emphasizing the struggle to stand up from the ruins of war on one’s own, was more the type of thinking that appealed to Hsu’s generation. This included radical self-questioning and resolutely building a new self that not only deviated from the Confucian-Taoist worldview, but also differed from the visions of a new culture that swept China following the May Fourth Movement after World War I.
A bird flew past holding a seed in its mouth / Without noticing, it dropped / There / It hatched a crack / Of struggle. (Hsu Yu-Jen, 1991)
In Trees and Stones, which Hsu completed in 1975, the same year he graduated from the National Taiwan Academy of Arts, a large tree trunk occupies the center of the xuan paper, standing erect and monumental, spreading branches left and right. Hsu might have failed his Chinese painting course, but it didn’t appear to have dented the painter’s self-confidence. From 1973 to 1980, his main series of works—Automatic Sketches, Invisible, and all manner of different self-portraits—still showed him to be groping for forms that had yet to solidify, but already they sent a strong message of the search for a sense of his own existence. His self-portrait is a subject he would subsequently revisit time and again. A key interest during this period of growth was the critical assessment of Chinese traditional art, and exploration of the culture of landscape art on his own terms.
Hsu’s Automatic Sketches, completed the year he graduated from the Academy of Arts, and the series I Frolic in Nature and the Cosmos (1973-75) were meandering, abstract line paintings that took shape under the guidance of Lee Chun-Shan. As though he was watching his own unconsciousness emerging from the void of white paper, Hsu gropingly brought forth artworks as if he were walking through the undergrowth of a forest or gazing at stars in the cosmos. The lines, flowing smoothly with ethereal forms, reveal that Hsu had been wandering the realm of landscape painting from the outset, even though the sense of his own presence in the world belonged to the post-industrial era. His criticism of and visceral feelings about the times he lived in went hand in hand with his painting. On the other hand, the inspired poetry that accompanied his paintings should be read in the tradition of poetic colophons on old paintings: Sometimes he lamented fate, and sometimes he criticized modern society; he would question the nature of life and being, or reflect on environmental issues.
An ID card, for example, is also one’s own "being." (Hsu Yu-Jen, 1982)
Apart from family and friends, Hsu’s sense of existence is built around his feelings for nature and its myriad plants and animals. When he was growing up, Hsu was fortunate to live in an era just before rapid urbanization. He grew up along the seaside of Tainan, where city and countryside mingled. He learned about fishing and farming on the periphery of industrial society, and he cherished the atmosphere of a form of life which lagged behind modern times. His advocacy of environmental protection does not arise from abstract knowledge. His resistance to the transformation of humanity by modernity is based on the good fortune of a memory of growing up with a different way of life.
The land is meant to be loved / Flowers are meant for liberating yourself / Now there are only the remnants of flowers / And wasteland (Inscription by Hsu Yu-Jen, 2007)
In his early works, Hsu Yu-Jen swung back and forth between two different subject matters: One was abstract line drawings with astrological images of the movement of stars through the cosmos. Another subject was small geometric forms being repeated in the empty space of a blank sheet; he would stack up repeating units that resemble small bricks, building them up in layers until they take shape along a horizon. The heavens and the human world were completely divided. The journals he kept during the years when he held a series of day jobs—especially when he was studying and living alone in the United States—are full of notes about how modern life divides up working hours and architectural masses into systems of units. “Every day, I just move from one cubicle to another,” he wrote. However, “when I wake up, the sun is still so bright outside my window, then I feel how completely unfamiliar this place is, as if I have arrived somewhere where the mountains seem to be climbing up a wall.” (From Journal of Hsu Yu-Jen, June 1982). For Hsu Yu-Jen, modern life was no different from the fate of Sisyphus.
Immediately after graduating from art school in 1975, Hsu entered the workforce, where he gained a deep-set feeling that modern life was an assembly of components and that people were the components being assembled. The oil paintings he made in the 1980s, after returning from a period living in the United States, reflected this feeling most profoundly. He would fill cities, people, plants, everything, with tiny rectangular cells, including the open sky beyond the manmade world.
He is a person who admires nature, keeping his eye on the horizon. With this firm ground under his feet, he does not care how much the world spins, and he is the kind of person who can keep standing upright amidst the whirling torrents of circumstance. He senses the elements of human society that are stacked up from the ground will inevitably be melded back into heaven and earth; even the ideal order of geometry will inevitably be washed away by the force of mountains and rivers. He is the sort who knows that all the shapes formed by repetitive units, including the sense of existence achieved with industry, must ultimately be subsumed within the natural landscape with its spinning earth and shifting stars.
Hsu Yu-Jen positions his art within the context of landscape painting. He loves the salty marshes and fish farms and the sparkling oceans that nurtured him. But today everything he sees around him is gradually transforming into concrete buildings and mounds of garbage. Routine forms of expression are inadequate to convey what he is experiencing before his own eyes. He uses painting as a process of exploration through which to discover the world and to test, even verify, himself in the here and now. To find a new navigation route that matches his own perception and to enjoy the happiness of creative vitality, he has been obliged to invent new techniques. However, crucially, from the very beginning Hsu decided to use fundamental, traditional tools, and also to follow intuitive paths of art-making.
I want to rediscover the primitive way of painting. Modern and classical techniques always moved forward through means of false embellishment. I, on the other hand, want to travel backward one step at a time. (From Journal of Hsu Yu-Jen, 1980s)
Hsu Yu-Jen often constructs his scenes using geometric shapes and lines. But triangles, squares and circles are not organic. Geometry is a set of idealized laws hidden in Nature, and yet idealized geometric forms stand precisely on the obverse side of constantly changing Nature. In this way landscapes bespeak of eternity yet also allude to oblivion. But of course, the cycle of life and death is also the law of the nature of heaven.
Hsu chooses to use broken lines of thin brushstrokes for his brush paintings. It is for him a special method that helps him to go beyond the parameters of the “brush.” The “line,” geometrically, is the intersection of two planes, without the presence of any volume. By employing thin brushstrokes, but also making his brushstrokes ubiquitously porous through the use of broken lines, Hsu renders his landscapes bright and translucent, crystalline and fluid. He does not ignore the traditional texturing and cadence of ink, but is always aware that his own style lies “outside” the techniques of traditional texturing and ink-washing. He also discovered that the interplay of light and shadow could replace the cadence of ink, and that his short thin brushstrokes could express the textures and substance of rocks and mountains equally well.
From the time Hsu first started his “thin-brush” ink paintings, he was also making his “rough brush” ink paintings in parallel. He has used both approaches for similar themes, except that his “rough brush” works are usually more impetuous. In recent years he has created a new kind of “text painting,” giving full play to his rough-brush calligraphy at a large scale, exaggerating the symbolic quality of his pictorial words and writing with bold, dry strokes, often using geometrically shaped characters. He arranges his words on his xuan paper like objects floating in outer space. They look as though they come from the beyond, like Taoist or shamanistic magical writing used for summoning the spirits.
From the standpoint of classical calligraphy, Hsu’s writing would understandably be dismissed. His characters defy classification—they are neither seal script nor cursive. He has no calligraphic mode, but he does have a method of composition. He has no spatial relationship between individual characters, but he does control their positioning to achieve a coherent pictorial composition. From a historical perspective, his texts belong to the kind of writing that has long existed outside the official history of calligraphy, just as his landscapes lie outside traditional ink painting. When we say “outside” the official history of calligraphy, we mean writing that has not been properly documented in the history of literati calligraphy and officialdom. Herein lies “calligraphic” writings used for communicating with the vast world of gods, witches and immortals: praying for souls, supplicating to heaven, praying for ancestors, exorcising demons—all these efforts to contact the spiritual world in China have historically been done through writing. Hsu’s freely executed calligraphic writings, rendered with a dry brush, float like prayer flags, like sutras flapping in the wilderness. They provoke the uncanny feeling of a book of spells with inexplicable power.
Text-as-landscape originates from a primal exploration of the blank space within a sheet of paper, starting from pursuing the form of a line, from asking why you are here in the world. Hsu Yu-Jen’s paintings have always been filled with yearning and questioning. His pictures and texts form an internal dialogue with each other. The free-standing large characters in the blank sheets that take the place of images of mountains and rivers may not be diagrams of Taoist cosmology, but still they convey the magnificence of landscapes.
In Chinese, a landscape is known as shan-shui, literally “mountain-water.” And a “mountain-water” landscape is a “mountain-water world”: each painting comprises an entire world, not just the world from one point of view. Hsu Yu-Jen’s early abstract depictions of the cosmos always remained hidden in his later landscape paintings, which viewed the world and shan-shui from a cosmic perspective.
When one paints landscapes with a cosmological vision, even a painting of a single flower is different from other pictures of flowers, because this flower is not one object, but the entirety of heaven and earth. In a 2013 hanging scroll with a thin-brush painting of flowers, Hsu blended the floral subject and the background into one harmonious whole. The sky seems to be filled with flying wisps or fine dust. Huge flowers are depicted in fragmentary lines that cover the whole paper to the point of being indiscernible, with brushstrokes as light as a dragonfly touching the surface of a pond. One cannot tell if it is a flower, a leaf, floating powder, silken threads, insects in flight or a starry sky—it is all a primordial chaos of great bright light.
Both his oil paintings of urban life filled with tiny components and his panoramic ink paintings in which the air is filled with fine cells of dust convey Hsu’s macrocosmic view of the world. Heaven and earth are not divided by any gap, but are as one. When we view his early dark, dense cityscapes alongside his landscapes that contain large areas of blank space, we understand that for Hsu Yu-Jen, leaving blank space is a technique of realism, expressing the close interconnection between the myriad forms of the material world and nothingness, being transformed into an atmosphere or a vague glimmer that fills the universe.
It is difficult to imagine a world “outside nature.” Humankind and the heavens have intermingled since ancient times; the two have never severed ties absolutely. Things built by humankind are never airtight. There will always be cracks, and from these cracks flowers and plants will grow. Hsu Yu-Jen is a natural force of vitality that has grown from such a crevice and, through unaccountable moments of serendipity, has been nurtured to become the painter Hsu Yu-Jen. Upon the living firmament that he has re-created with his art he now firmly stands.
When I first saw the salt fens as a child / The gleam from the surface of the water burned into my heart / Walking through the scalding sand dunes/ The salty sticky sea breeze/ Passing through the enigmatic motherly ironwood forest/ The dazzling flat blue distance / …The semicircular sea / Kissing the sky / From that moment on, the sea had awakened me / ... No matter what mood I’m in, I want to go to the sea! I’ve swum underwater through scenes like paintings from ancient times / Now, with a small brush, with slow, slender lines / I write and paint “I who belong to the sea.” (Hsu Yu-Jen, 2004)
Chang Tsong-Zung, 2024