Hung Hsuan
Excerpts from Implicit Allusions Omnipresent Like the Moonlight, Hung Hsuan
The diaphanously transparent texture of the silk naturally results in a thin film state. It prompts me to ponder: Could the translucency be preserved during the mounting, so that an open field, complete with its texture and original color, can be created for the storage of figures and landscapes depicted? A series of works has therefore come into being. Most of my earlier paintings have featured figures in massage or stretching as the subjects, silhouetted against an expanse of white, using the fluorescent colors in the outer rings to add a vignetting effect.
The background, seemingly filled with dense and fragmented line drawings at first sight, comprises unrepeated images of various objects. Some are nonsensical or even illogical, but are deliberately laid out in a dense or sparse manner to guide the viewer via an invisible path.
Perhaps it is some sort of luck, as I always say to myself, that I often find myself intrigued by something interesting or imperfect in the surroundings that might go completely unnoticed by most people. Over time, I have come to terms with it by laughing at myself: time to check my eyesight again. I have gradually realized that there is something of an obsession in me about observing tiny little things. Countlessly I have found myself aware of foreign objects in the meal before digging in at a restaurant, and small cracks recently formed in the wall or tiles due to thermal expansion and contraction. My phone’s album is full of snaps of daily life with a micellany of themes–passersby wearing eyeglass chains, and ubiquitous rectangular concrete pots ornamented on four sides with traditional landscape paintings, to name just a few. The shots, characterized by a strong personal preference, have accumulated into a database of graphic messages, inspiring me to underscore negligible things in existence through my creative endeavors with a few insights.
The idea of Gong Di Ju derives from an ordinary construction site. As I walked by, with the yellow warning tape guiding my line of sight, the whole scene looked like an extensively long scroll. Thus I have tried to connect and transform the existing and traditional objects at the construction site. This sense of realization comes to me not only externally but internally as well. Owing to a family history of keloid disorder, injuries or wounds would often leave solid, raised, inerasable scars in their wake. This particular physical feeling has strengthened my perception of marks, directing my attention to the fact that the accidental marks from brush or drops of water on the paper, compared with other base materials, are almost irreversible. Based on this shared feeling, I try to replace the brush lines with solid cotton threads, hiding them in layers of paper through mounting. With the surface of the paper gently rubbed thin with fingers, the buried threads slowly emerge to deliver a relief look with an uneven texture. In some parts, the threads are removed to create grooves, which echoes the Yin and Yang engraving of seal carving, allowing for reexamination of the subject-object relation between the painting and the mount.