Artist: KO Si-Chi、  Hsu Yu-Jen 、  Lee Kuang-Yu、  Jo Hsieh、 Tsai Shih-Hung

 Booth: C06

Ko Si-Chi is born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1929. His major work focused in landscape and portrait. He set a milestone of the modern style of photography for Taiwan. Later he moved to New York. Gradually, Ko doesn’t only make his own name as a top photographer in New York. His art works had been published in Time Magazine in 70s. He left New York, and started traveling South Europe, North Africa, and China in 80s. He embraced the world again in a clear mood during this travel. Ko relies on his highly refined technical skill and artistic intuition to achieve the perfect fusion of poetry and aesthetics, and his works are suffused with contemporary sentiments and humane concern. 

Ko has crossed over between purely artistic and commercial photography, and his works have been widely collected by major art museums in Taiwan and abroad. He has also held many exhibitions in New York, Switzerland, Beijing, and Taiwan. Ko consequently was honored with the Executive Yuan’s 10th National Arts and Culture Award in 2006. Ko Si-chi began his series “Taiwan of his heart” in 80s. His vision of Taiwan overflows with an aesthetic appreciation of human culture and a concern for humanity. He plans to continue to create works reflecting this theme in future as a memorial to Taiwan that spans time and space, and that also has a timeless artistic value. 

Born in Jiali, Tainan in 1951, Hsu Yu-Jen now lives in Sanzi, Taipei. He is a representative painter of modern ink painting in Taiwan. In addition to receiving an academic training at National Taiwan Academy of Arts, Hsu also studied under Lee Chun-Shan, “the master of Taiwanese modern art.” Since 1995, he has developed a unique style of thin brush and thick brush ink painting. His work has been shown in Cologne, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and Taipei, and has been collected by various museums in the US, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Hsu’s ink painting possesses a vividly individualistic style that is fresh and innovative. He prefers to paint nature without only focusing on aesthetic portrayal of natural environment as in traditional ink painting. Whether it is his oil painting with dense and intricate brushstrokes or his simple yet everlasting ink painting, Hsu’s art conveys individual life’s perseverance and predicament in its lonely existence in an industrialized society that denies the nurturance of nature, which renders his painting intensely modern and literary.