Body•Transcending
Hsu Yunghsu is a life that has never stopped living, and has never stopped creating artistic works. He can be called a teacher under a national education system, or an athlete, or even a music performer, but we prefer calling him a producer of life. Playing different roles at different positions, Hsu Yunghsu pays concerns for the relationship between self and body. He is unable to employ the mind-body dualism of René Descartes who resolutely cut body from thinking. In the creation experience of Hsu Yunghsu, he breaks the materiality of body. How do the body and the self that he has reestablished look like? This is a journey of exploration, and let this journey start now. In his works, what Hsu Yunghsu has focused is the direction that he develops from his career of artistic creation. It is both complicated and direct. Unlike his works in the early days having a series of different topics assigned, these works seem to have contents being not so fruitful as their assigned topics. Viewing from the experience of the collateral existence of creation and life, we can see the insatiability of the creator. It somehow explains a fact that the person as a self has something that has not been fulfilled and is lacking in him. This fact enables the art creator to have continuous productivity of creative works and an extension towards life.
To a clay artists who had never gotten in touch with clay until the age of 30, his life experience in his early years could not drastically allow him to immediately abandon and completely separate from the work and living realms that the art creator left earlier. However, the transition from the linkage with the past to the life of the later days was endlessly fruitful. Before getting in touch with clay, Hsu Yunghsu’s roles of being an athlete and a music performer had left some tracks to the training of his body –– perhaps this is a question that we can ask. When Hsu Yunghsu encountered the limit of his body during his career of being an athlete, he had no way but to retreat from the stage. However, he did not let the curtain fall, and did not consider it the final point of his personal prosperous life. Instead, his enriched life emotion and affection made possible the extension of his vitality. Nevertheless, how life could unconventionally detached itself from the physical body and extend continuously became the main starting point for the artistic creation of Hsu Yunghsu. From Hsu Yunghsu’s exploration of his life, it was found that those miscellaneous past episode were merely like the planned blueprints. Hsu Yunghsu started exploring the elimination of the objectives of life, and letting creation and life complete in themselves. This kind of existence and possession that eliminated the objectives and led life to uncertainties for development afterwards were a real exploration. This way of creation was deeply attracting the art creators. Such a life story was also dragging out our search. In the process of reading his creative works and his life, and when keeping at a distance of watching and observation, it was in fact not easy to detach every “being” from them. The objects of the created result did not exist for the objectives. Life no longer marched to any absolute destinations, but was open. The process of creation seemed like the course of life, with its results –– the works –– more soul-stirring and profoundly affecting. Following the artist’s probing of his creative works seemed to be an adventure. His trudging on life and his traveling over mountains and valleys became another kind of concern for the creation.
After Hsu Yunghsu started to get in touch with clay and the related creation, his creation space, materials and mobility became a number of paradoxes faced by him after the switch of his direction. From the stability in the past, the artist started entering an unstable state of living. Economically, he had no substantial income. Besides, he could not predict the future of his creation. In such a rhythm of life, Hsu Yunghsu intended to use the mystery of art and the grasp of instability to interpret the uncontrollable life. Choosing clay as the material for his artistic creation could be called a coincidence. However, there was inevitable interpretation that it was similar to the material of life, having the same malleability with the same ideas but in different approaches, and possessing the softness with uncertain states. It seemed that Hsu Yunghsu intended to exceed something from the clay models. His works in the early days generally have a series of topics assigned. From 1993 to 2000, his works with the topics of “Dance,” ”Drama,” and “Seat” were mostly shaped by clay rings. In the very beginning, he once used sketches or designed drawings to design his works. Later on, he intended to get out of the way of thinking of the design plan in advance. At that time, the topics paid concerns for the depiction of real life. The works consciously reflected the real inner feeling of the artistic creator that was coping with the reality of the society, and investigated the various types of people living in the society. His works had a strong sense of criticism. For example, in the series of his works, “Seat” completed in 2000, he integrated the images of man and chair by a sitting gesture, forming a simple sculpt of a seat. The tall and perfectly straight geometrical lines explain our multiple positions and roles in the busy society. After venting over the social bondage in multiple layers, the art creator started to turn his direction outwards, looking for the emotion surged out of his heart. His works turned to pay concerns for being and self. Such a turning start is a kind of metaphoric spatial vocabulary. We found that from the enclosed clay rings, his works opened outwards. The works with such ambiguous and nameless gloominess and darkness seemed like the public artworks being displayed on the ground or exhibition space, without any specific lines, but only with hugeness. They always gave us a feeling that was similar to the sense of suppression and invasion perceived in those spatial vocabularies of the works of minimalism. However, when we investigated his works, his sculptural style, just like that of landscape artists, was found to be so simple and having dialogs with the watchers. Turning back to Hsu Yunghsu himself, we saw him set off from his concepts, and let his own feelings extend. The artist creator was deeply impressed by this kind of conceptual sculptural vocabularies. These works absolutely did not set off from the angle of limit. From the simple and elegant works, the impact with gigantic power could be sensed. What he challenged absolutely was not a mere extension of limit, but a power of life waiting for breaking through. The artistic form in concise style even more made us notice such a vitality transformed from material.
As from 2005, new experience continuously caused impacts to the art creator. The ideology, “I think, therefore I am,” could no longer satisfy Hsu Yunghsu’s eager hunt and insatiability towards life. What thing could life give him? What thing could he give for himself? The theme of creation began to change. “I am; therefore I think.” Through taking body as the main target, he went into creation. Such a process seemed like a dialectical process of “self.” Creation absolutely was not a plastic art being simple and independent from oneself. The material of clay was taken as an extension of body, and creation was taken as an extension of life. The tenacity of clay material and other people’s prejudiced impression of fragility on clay material were tactfully similar to the characteristics of life. In the creation works of Hsu Yunghsu, the concept of size and dimensions was different from those of minimalism. Through the thinness of a work and the relative greatness to it, and through the extreme instability in the work, he challenged the limit of the creator’s body. As mentioned by Hsu Yunghsu, destruction and damage became a part of the completion of a work. Without destruction and damage, going beyond could not be undertaken. Through other materials, the art creator again deconstructed the saying, “body exists while being taken as a substance,” heightening the level of body. Once the art creator entered a situation that heart was not taken as the only dominator, and a process that body contained the spirituality of creation material and material and body melted together, then during this time body began to have innovative meaning, just like being given a brand new beginning of epistemology. Clay led the art creator re-explore his own body to soothe the uneasiness of the art creator. The art creator did not have a new form or style, but brought a kind of exploration to a new way of creation. The forsaking of profile and frame referred to the insatiate, anxious and uneasy emotions. Through the intentionless and barehanded kneading of clay, the art creator felt the body of that moment. The prioritized visual position of plastic art seemed to have left to the watcher. The art creator had found a way of not being firstly watched to start his creation. Again, new experience made Hsu Yunghsu extend his abundant vitality of creation. Up to here, creation and life, originally being two parallel lines, intersected and intercrossed. Such kind of creation was the moment leaving the physical time, as well as the second that the art creator met the material. As told by the art creator, it was just like the relationship with lover. Apart from having been the producer of works, the art creator served as the producer of life. He kneaded and modeled repeatedly, overriding the spiritual situation of body, and holding a psychological situation that seemed like rope dancing. New experience was surging out continuously, and new feelings were experienced continuously. After his own body was consumed by the main subject, much more were accomplished for his self. Via body, this way of consuming the physical body extended to the material of creation, appearing a kind of new experience of self, a kind of new meaning for the existence of human beings. The aesthetics of game began, and so did life.
Experimentally, the art creator made memories reappear. Then he started handling a new issue about whether memories could reappear again. Whenever the art creator entered his workshop and started kneading clay, he took photographs of his works and appreciated them himself. He tried his best to recollect his feeling of that time. As a result, the non-reappearance to be achieved from his memories once again became a kind of new experience that could not be predicted. Through the swaying of the position of its main subject by the art creator, it became flowing. The physical body and the fixed time and space were re-arrayed and wrongly placed in the action of creation. When it was folded in space at the same time, more secret corners were folded, thus finding more folds in self. The art creator talked about the “inertia” that had to be overcome in the process of creation. The art creator was made to have inertia in the experience of overcoming creation. By different gestures and contacts with clay, the art creator was pleased with his body, provoking more experience of consciousness to surge out. This creative idea of active attempt is fascinating to people. And such courage of challenging anxiety is also admirable.
Hsu Yunghsu determined his creation from the prerequisite image. From the pre-designed design plan to letting body directly face the clay, the process was no longer circuitous. This way of creation was not to produce subjective or objective artistic works, but to bravely pass himself to clay, and also to life. When the art creator started involving in clay art, although he intended to challenge and negate that old saying, “after a work enters the kiln, it is passed to the hands of the kiln, waiting for the joy of opening the kiln,” he threw himself to a new cognition of body consciousness. The transition of creation enabled us to see that when the so-called “clay” was taken as the material of creation, the intertextuality between clay and body was vague and stagnant. This is just like the ambiguity of the inseparable relationship between a ten-month pregnant mother and her son, or just like the paradoxical relationship and intimacy between two lovers. Hsu Yunghsu actively and courageously took action to challenge the sense of body. This active act was the only consciousness that we could guess in the creation process of the art creator. This kind of active act abandoned self in front of the creation material by using an active method. It was a naked spreading in front of the clay, challenging the boundary of body and establishing new sensory knowledge. The relationship between it and the tactfulness of the post-modernists’ so-called decentralized needs to be observed and explored by us.