There’s already one thing inherently summary within the uniquely religious and metaphorical use of empty house in conventional Chinese language portray. The liubai (留白), or “leaving clean,” transforms vacancy into an area of evocation, creativeness and contemplation—the place the invisible and sensually unreachable are allowed to emerge. This summary gesture is embedded throughout the picture itself, which conveys actuality as it’s felt or intuited relatively than as it’s seen. In artist Hung Hsien’s early, extra conventional work, we are able to glimpse the seeds of her later luminous and cosmic abstractions, impressed by the pure and energetic circulation of all issues.
An in depth retrospective now on view at Asia Society Texas in Houston lastly pays homage to her long-overlooked, richly layered and expansive oeuvre, bridging conventional Chinese language ink portray with postwar abstraction. One of the quietly modern ink painters of the twentieth Century, Hung Hsien created a physique of labor in fixed oscillation—between East and West, between the seen and the felt. From the East, she attracts a profound religious and philosophical grounding that enables her to push the evocative and virtually mystical potentialities of abstraction ever additional—inviting us nearer to the invisible, tapping into the not-yet-visible and fascinating with the enduring mysteries of the universe.
It wasn’t till he moved to Houston that Owen Duffy, curator and director of exhibitions at Asia Society Texas, encountered Hung Hsien’s work. Over espresso with a curator from the Denver Artwork Museum, he was shocked to study {that a} dwelling legend was hiding in plain sight in Houston, dwelling not removed from their establishment. Now in her nineties, Hung Hsien has work in main U.S. collections, together with the Harvard Artwork Museums, the Good Museum of Artwork on the College of Chicago and the Phoenix Artwork Museum. But broader recognition of her contributions was lengthy delayed, doubtless hindered by the intersecting biases of being each a girl and Asian.
Curated by two main students—Dr. Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres, a historian of contemporary and modern Chinese language artwork, in session with Dr. Einor Cervone, affiliate curator of arts of Asia on the Denver Artwork Museum—this new exhibition, organized in collaboration with Asia Society Hong Kong, goals to deliver overdue consideration to her work. On view by way of September 21, the present assembles greater than fifty works spanning greater than 70 years, drawn from personal collections and the artist’s private archives.
Hung Hsien was born in 1933 within the Republic of China. Her father was an official within the republican authorities, and she or he got here of age throughout an period of profound upheaval, dwelling by way of World Struggle II, the Japanese invasion and the Communist Revolution. In 1948, like hundreds of thousands of others, her household fled to Taiwan, the place she started her path as an artist.
Her first vital instructor was Pu Ru, a famend painter, calligrapher and scholar, cousin of China’s final emperor Puyi and a member of the Qing imperial household. Usually described as one of many final nice literati within the classical custom, Pu Ru’s affect left a long-lasting mark on her early growth.
The earliest portray within the exhibition dates to 1950, created when Hung Hsien was simply 17. It displays the affect of Pu Ru’s poetic sensibility and mastery of conventional Chinese language portray. Her apprenticeship adopted a classical mannequin: college students would go to his studio and watch him paint for hours. One needed to be invited—and pay—however there was no formal instruction. Hung Hsien was anticipated to watch, take up after which return house to follow. The method itself demanded rigorous self-discipline, coaching, reminiscence, focus and self-awareness.
In early works like Tree Examine I and II (1952), Hung Hsien shortly mastered using liubai—the artwork of leaving house—not as vacancy however as a discipline of potential. These clean areas permit nature’s power and the viewer’s creativeness to increase the picture into an ever-expanding discipline of illustration. The house surrounding timber and mountains doesn’t diminish the picture; it completes and enlarges it, balancing and enhancing the painted types whereas providing the attention room to relaxation, wander and replicate—inviting solitude, silence, transience and contemplation.
Using liubai in Chinese language portray is deeply entwined with the idea of qi (氣), which interprets as “important power,” “breath,” or “life power.” Qi flows by way of each ink and absence, making the composition fluid, alive and dynamically balanced. The managed use of clean house reveals restraint, refinement and the artist’s capacity to channel that power with precision and readability. Hung Hsien educated on this from an early age, and the works within the exhibition’s opening part already reveal her outstanding command, each as a painter and as a vessel for cosmic life power.
In black-and-white panorama work that preceded her departure, corresponding to Sea of Cloud (1955), we are able to already hint a extra liberated, freehand fashion. Reasonably than specializing in pure components themselves, Hung Hsien seeks to seize one thing extra immaterial: the ethereal fantastic thing about the scene. By the point we attain works like Primordial Panorama (1968), a full metamorphosis has taken place. Her strategy pushes the painterly and poetic potential of ink to counsel fluid evolutions of the picture relatively than documenting a set imaginative and prescient of actuality. Working with daring, watery gestures freed from construction, she is not depicting the pure world; as a substitute, she focuses on the act of mark-making as a channel for a primordial, magmatic flux of matter and power from which all issues come up.
But the notion of qi stays central, as does the normal steadiness between management and spontaneity. Her daring brushstrokes are punctuated by moments of stillness—pauses, silences, vacancy—infusing the work with each primal dynamism and contemplative calm. These breaks within the picture turn into as important because the marks themselves, giving the composition the sensation of the cosmos in movement: fluid, uncooked and continually changing into.
Abstraction as an interaction between mass and lightweight, shade and motion lies on the coronary heart of luminous works like Blue Sky (1964), the place floating, nebulous accumulations of brushstrokes ebb like tides, pierced by sudden sparkles of sunshine. The result’s a composition that feels without delay weightless and dense, just like the thriller of a shifting sky formed by atmospheric forces, moon cycles and photo voltaic rhythms. This portray was doubtless a part of the physique of labor proven throughout Hung Hsien’s first solo exhibition at Mori Gallery in Chicago in 1965, marking a pivotal second in her creative evolution.
Different works from this era, like Moonlight (1965), discover a fragile pressure between figuration and abstraction, the earthly and the transcendental. In Moonlight, the artist begins to carve out faint traces of the true from the blurred darkness of a nocturnal city scene simply sufficient to reanchor the picture in bodily actuality. Nearly instantly, that actuality slips away once more, dissolved right into a moonlit avenue that appears to soften right into a flowing present of sunshine and shadow, as if turning into
As Duffy factors out, it carefully parallels the automated processes explored by the Surrealists—psychic automatism, unconscious gesture, the hand transferring earlier than the thoughts. However in Chinese language portray, qi is formed by each spontaneity and restraint. It’s not chaos however relatively practiced concord between intention and give up. And in Hung Hsien’s work, you are feeling that steadiness: the comb breathes, the picture lives, however the whole lot emerges from meditation and contemplation that give full company to the interaction of thoughts, spirit and physique.
Because the third precept of Xie He’s canon states, a superb portray captures the true nature or type of its topic—not simply its seen look, however its essence. The best stage of portray arises from a fusion of technical ability, philosophical depth and ethical cultivation—a really perfect Hung Hsien pursued all through her life and work.
For Hung Hsien, portray meant working for eight hours straight, sustained immersion till one thing emerged. As Owen Duffy recounts, Hung Hsien stated her greatest work usually got here out of those lengthy, uninterrupted periods, when she entered a selected state. It needed to be quiet, with nobody round. Full isolation and silence have been important to slipping into that house the place the comb might transfer freely, virtually with out aware thought. Later in life, she turned extremely expert in Tai Chi, which, as Duffy notes, made excellent sense. The identical ideas apply: breath, steadiness, inner power and the circulation of qi. It’s about transferring from inside whereas changing into a channel for the universe’s breath.
The result’s a number of the most cosmically attuned, visionary abstraction—works that translate onto canvas not simply phenomena however the power, the aura of matter in transformation, the dwelling power that animates all issues. Immersed within the energetic pull of a portray like Sundown Gentle within the Mountain Rocks (1990), we perceive how, for Hung Hsien, portray turned an act of absolute devotion—a disciplined train in connecting to the cosmos. She absolutely embraced the probabilities of abstraction to transcend the bounds of our transient, earthly expertise.
This quadriptych is probably the most monumental work within the exhibition, and likewise one of many final items Hung Hsien selected to share publicly. As we speak, she continues to color in her studio, pushed by the identical inside want that has at all times guided her. However she additionally feels her mission as a painter has, in some sense, been fulfilled. Now that she not feels capable of honor this rigorous, bodily demanding translation of dwelling power with the identical depth, she has turned towards a quieter ritual—portray as contemplation, as meditation, as a filter between the seen and the invisible and bridge between worlds.
“Hung Hsien: Between Worlds” is on view at Asia Society Texas by way of September 26.
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