Opening

2018.12.21 14:00

Venue

Art Center of Providence University

The Realm Beyond Ink, the first Solo Exhibition of ink artist Hsu Yu-Jen at the Art Center of Providence University, showcases his prominent ink series, including Thin-brush Ink Painting Series, Aquarene Painting Series and Ink Scribing Series. Through three distinctive types of ink expression, the artist has demonstrated his unique interpretation of ink aesthetics while capturing the diverse characteristics and expressiveness of ink. As an ink artist, Hsu’s work shows his individual brushwork and approach by maintaining the ethereal charm of ink while embodying modern minimalistic concept. Rather than completely abandoning the Westernized abstraction of ink or simply continuing the pattern of traditional literati painting, Hsu has re-engineered and re-generated the Eastern cultural gene after the impact of Western concepts. He combines Western geometric composition and the Eastern aesthetics of blank space, and incorporates his own life, temperament and sensibility into the fundamental relationship between ink and life and that of ink and nature, giving ink an innovative expressive power in a pure yet precise way.

Three ink painting series are showcased in this exhibition. The first is Thin-brush Painting Series. Hsu uses the so-called dry ink to paint and create images that are reminiscent sketch drawings composed of rigid, fragmented and short lines. The faintly thin and broken lines convey a charm of ancient paintings. Inheriting traditional Chinese ink spirit, the series seems to be faintly whispering lament and sorrow buried deep in the soul. In Aquarene Painting Series, on the contrary, the artist uses thick brush and dense ink to delineate solid and upright outlines of the subjects and conveys a vibrant force of life. The artist also employs rich colors in the series to depict the moist atmosphere and abundance of Taiwan’s climate and geography. At the same time, Hsu has not only used Xuan paper to create this series of painting, but also made use of wooden tofu plates to create a group of smaller aquarene paintings that exude the lyrical charm of short poems. Also on view in this exhibition is Ink Scribing Series. In this series, the artist re-constructs and re-inscribes Chinese characters by adopting painting structures. The combination of lines conveys an unadorned yet intriguing graphic quality for reading, responding to the ink spirit of “calligraphy and ink painting share the same origin.”