6/17 Sat
15:00-16:30
Lecture: WU Chao-Jen
16:30
Opening
Hsu Yu-Jen and Lee Kuang-Yu, two classmates at National Taiwan Academy of Arts, have each gone through more than half a century of ups and downs in life, and are now finally showcased in the same exhibition. To both artists, who have experienced the vicissitudes of life, Void Garden does not point to “emptiness” Instead, both artists possess unique energy that enables their works to move between “fullness” and “emptiness.”
In Void Garden, Hsu Yu-Jen exhibits several of his art series: in the Color Painting Series, one can see his early works featuring the motif of flowers – an imagery that he uses as a symbol of life or self. In the Aquarene Painting Series, the artist adds more delicate ink expression into his rough, rugged brushstrokes comprising Rough-brush Ink Painting Series. When visiting Hsu’s studio in March, he was experimenting with a group of works drawn with homemade charcoals on discarded Xuan paper and acrylic sheets. His studio brings to mind the “aesthetics of ruins.” He used to say in a rather solemn tone, “everything perishes eventually.” Strictly speaking, Hsu’s rough-brush works have a high rate of failure—that is, after a careful process of selection, only less than ten percent of all the created works is accepted and kept by the artist in the end.
Contrasting to the aesthetics of ruins embodied by Hsu’s studio on Yuanshan, Lee’s garden in the mountains of Xizhi is like a European castle—after two decades of dedicated efforts, the botanical diversity created by camellia, pine trees and other plants almost makes the garden a contemporary equivalent of a 19th-century botanical garden.
Lee’s Enduring Fortune (2019) on view in the exhibition is similar to a folding screen or a hanging scroll in its form. The work has an even more special feature: the artist opens up the center of the scroll, and brings part of the work through and wrap around the center, allowing the work to enter the space beyond the two-dimensional plane and demonstrate an interaction between lines and planes. This type of works differs from Lee’s previous figure and buddha head sculptures (e.g., his work displayed on top of the entrance of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts) in terms of the sense of volume, and demonstrates a light and transparent beauty. However, to the artist, his art, life and spiritual practice have always moved between “the void” and “the real.”
Excerpt from Wu Chao-Jen’s essay, “Void Garden—Boundary between the Physical World and the Void”
