Shaping the Other Way: A Look at the Concept of “Anti-clay” in Hsu Yunghsu’s work

Author： Sean C.S. Hu

As one enters Hsu Yunghsu’s studio, the enormous space gives off an atmosphere of self-discipline and tension. This is the laboratory of his art. As the artist dexterously handles each apparatus and tool, there is always a hint of unschooled anxiety in his honest smile, and the occasional trac of exhaustion. He stands alone and yet full of determination, walking amongst the towering jungle of ceramic pieces. This is his very own world, his regime, a confession booth of life in which he contemplates, faces challenges, and accepts defeats and victories in succession. The large amount of imported clay neatly arranged in the warehouse expresses the vigilance of the artist, as though all standing at attention, ready to begin working at the artist’s first command. The kilns, two of the largest in the world to be found in an individual’s studio, are also on stand-by, awaiting the biggest challenge the artist can give.

 

Personality dictating destiny; concepts dictating the result of creation

 

Hsu’s own humble personality gives off an air of earthy stability, a kind of Asian-specific peaceful introspection, which may well be projected onto the texture and atmosphere of his work. However, Hsu also possesses the resilience and courage of a contemporary artist who dares to challenge, subvert and create. When an artist applies the most difficult and incomprehensible methodto the creative material he is most familiar with, the action reveals a kind of paradoxical conflict which one can see in his work and person: a convergence of tenderness and aggression, of nostalgia and subversion, of the east and west, and of passion and tranquility. Because of this, the viewing experience of Hsu’s work offers a strong sense of dramatic tension, rhythm and cadence.

 

Gazing upon the works at hand, I cannot help but become attracted by the gargantuan and wafer-thin shapes of clay volumes, created by the artist in bodily response to the clay, while simultaneously feeling questions arise. As the pieces completely subvert our preconceived notions of what ceramic art means, such a method packs a new visual punch, and creates a new form and path for contemporary ceramic art. The question is to find out what methods, tools and concepts enabled the artist to overcome the innate limitations of clay and bend it according to his will.

 

Faced with the clay which keeps him company day in and day out, Hsu uses the strategy of reiteration and exploration to set the scene for his potential creations. He attempts to deconstruct the idea of clay, by pressing, pushing, squeezing, tearing, pinching, poking, squashing, layering and overlaying, with his fingers. He also uses different parts of his body as tools to support, hold, move, surround, await, and embed into the construction and presentation of his work. This concept of using the human body as an apparatus of creation may be linked to the idea of the body within the scope of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. In Hsu’s philosophy of creation, the traditional philosophical discourse of the binary opposition between subject and object (subject-object) is abandoned in favor of facing the clay at hand with an approach which melds the self and the body, expanding upon the “body-subject” configuration. In this way, Hsu “interlocks the ‘self’ existing as subject and the ‘body’ which serves as material existence, and views the two as one complete construct which cannot be separated.”[1] However, the “body” denoted here is not merely the material, corporeal form we recognize, nor is it a subject which can be easily comprehended. Through cognition, touch, and other sensations, this body enables the “body-subject” to flow into and react upon the world within the structure of clay, shaping and creating the subject of the piece. This body merges the outside and the self into an embodiment of the world, so that the two may unite and illuminate the meaning of existence, achieving a unification of the object and the subject in an aesthetical sense. This is the main thrust of Hsu Yunghsu’s life, philosophy and aesthetics. Launching forth from this point, the viewer can then approach the artist and his work in the present.

 

Anti-clay

Therefore, under the whole-hearted, full-body experimentation of the artist, clay begins to transcend its intrinsic limitations ofweight, density, and size. After the artist pushes clay to its limits, it acquires lightness, and forms grand and delicate pieces which are awe-inspiring and rare among ceramic sculptures. The extreme mass and thinness of Hsu’s clay work is unprecedented in the history of ceramic art in both concept and style,managing to balance massive forms against a delicate lightness. This method of shaping the clay in a manner contrary to its very own characteristics, essentially shaping it the other way around, is termed as “anti-clay.” The concept of anti-clay came into being when the artist entered into a new creative phase in 2006. This unique aesthetic viewpoint became the milestone in Hsu’s work. Since then he has brought ceramic art in Taiwan into a whole new era. By pushing clay beyond its own limits, into a material which redefines the artist’s own artistic perspective, Hsu transforms his own creations into art which merges form, action, and conceptualization.

 

Going forward with the idea of anti-clay, Hsu chooses to challenge the unpredictable nature and practical limitations of clay – which creative potential changes with the shifts in weather, temperature and humidity – through an act of openness. He eliminates elements which would ensure success, and sheds the sense of security, forcing himself into difficult situations where his work may crumble before his eyes. This way, he enables a repeated process of exploration and action through challenges on the body, and attempts to break free of creative habits in order to look to other possibilities, until even the act of change becomes a habit in itself. In this manner, the entire creative process is surrounded by an array of internal, external, reliable, and unreliable elements, and is therefore filled with variants and tension. After undergoing different sensations of the body, the cycle returns to the beginning, and the initial tension breaks, replaced by a boundary-breaching sense of relaxation. As the whole creative process repeats, the tension in the body follows the fluctuation of the process. At this point the sense of the body becomes “an ineffable phenomenon happening between the inner and the outer, the past and the present. This is because the sense of the body not only responds to the cognitive experience of reaction towards outside elements, but is also involves the body’s self-generated, inner cognitive circuit as the body processes these cognitive actions.”[2] Also, “this ‘sense of the body’ is not merely a sedimentation of past experiences, but also directs the proceedings of our perception, pointing towards projections, understanding and actions for future scenarios.”[3]

 

In this state, Hsu continues his attempts at re-creating difficulties and transcending boundaries, and therefore continues to enter into an alternative plane of life, using his bodyin the process of exploration. This is because for the artist, while the very essence of life is repetition, an ever-looping cycle, the general attitude towards artistic creation demands innovation and variation. To come to terms with this, Hsu chooses to extend outward from his body-subject, searching for innovation and the resolution to the issue at hand through repetition. In this way, the sense of the body during the process is then transported onto the surface of clay through fingerprints and the pressure exerted by fingers. Thus different textures are created through tons of thousands of impressions of life, while the pain and torture of the body caused by the process are endlessly magnified. As a result, the whole creative action is built upon a point of crisis, the sense of the body concentrated in intensity, and a sense of existence is enhanced in comparison.

 

Large Unit, Small Unit

After the establishment of the concept of anti-clay, Hsu’s work can be categorized into two forms of expression, which I am calling large-unit and small-unit. The large-unit pieces were mainly presented in Transcending Boundaries, his solo exhibition at Tainan National University of the Arts in 2006, and in the Theatre of Clay exhibition at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in 2008. Shown in singular or paired clusters, arranged within the exhibition space, these ceramic giants with their undulations and monumentality, evoke mystical and ritualistic qualities. Adding the effect to the diaphanous exchange between light and shadow, the viewer might as well have walked into a Chinese-style garden. The visual vocabulary bears a subtle resemblance to craggy rocks formations, evoking an atmosphere that is tranquil yet brimming with intense emotions and spirituality. Such an experience brings about a poetic spatiality tinged with theatricality, as though numerous performers are conversing in artistic language with the viewers.

 

For the large-unit pieces, the clay, minimalistic vocabulary, and enormous volume forms organic shapes reminiscent of visual expressions found in Minimalism, a western artistic movement in the 50s and 60s. However, the concepts and actions in Hsu’s work are unrelated and far afield from the dispassionate expression and interest in modernization of Minimalistic art. On the contrary, Hsu’s pieces create a concentrated, warm sensibility, and are Hsu’s very own unique artistic expression.

 

Michel Foucault has once pointed out that the human race seeks to gain understanding of the self through four methods, including the “technologies of production, sign systems, power, and the self.” Of the four, as with “the technologies of the self” “individuals [are able] to effect… a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves… in order to reflect upon ‘the self, the soul and the heart.’”[4] During the large-unit period, Hsu goes through a series of explorations and examinations on the body in order to transform himself into the embodiment of the aesthetical principles he pursues. In other words, the “technology of the self” becomes the central methodology of the artist’s foray into the core values of his aesthetics, and through it, Hsu attempts to understand the self by pursuing different kinds of life experiences and introspection.

 

Shifting from the 2009 Iteration exhibition at the Moon Gallery in Taichung to Iteration In-Between at Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei in 2010, one can see that Hsu’s concept of “anti-clay” has shifted into the small-unit category. Unlike the extraordinary size of the large-unit works, the small-unit shapes are gradually developed by the artist by experimentation which led him toward the discovery of another sort of corporeality. As each unit, small enough to fit in one’s hands, is shaped into being, the process of creation still preserves the tension of the body. The state of the body is also more relaxed than during the creation of a large-unit piece. Still, as the small units stack up under the repetition of identical finger movements, the recessive tension created by the piece itself starts to slowly emerge, under a pressure which fluctuates with the changes in the temperature and humidity of the environment as well as with the heaviness of the work’s volume. This emerging pressure becomes clearer and gradually heightens, as though an arrow held ready on a tightened bow string, while the sense of the body pulled forth becomes clearly defined and experienced, as though Hsu has layered and stacked his own body to create the pieces, chunk after chunk. The viewer can feel a profound sense of the body in dis/re-placement, while the art work and the body serve as each other’s parts and whole. Such a viewing experience is a close fit for Gilles Deleuze’s theory in which thoughts flow freely amongst the material world, and that there is no such thing as the separation between the body and the mind.

 

In his small-unit period, the artist’s creative status resonates with Deleuze’s materialistic idea of “body without organs” in that the smallest unit in question is not a body which is complete and in possession of a soul, but rather something that could be limitlessly expanded beyond all bodily boundaries. It is both a break and a connection, both a combination and a disintegration; it is “a conglomeration of disconnection and an anti-production machine: it endlessly dissembles, delays, freezes, and breaks down, causing a separation and a break in the circuits of the machine of desire, while at the same time interconnecting the multiple overall circuits of the machine of desire.”[5] The production of art, or as Deleuze describes, the production of desire, is always “a pure multiplicity, and absolutely cannot be reduced to a single whole.”[6] What we used to refer to as the world, nature, or materials can all be called a “body without organs” to Deleuze, and we are all part of this primal pool of matter. All our bodies are “bodies without organs,” and Hsu and his work are “bodies without organs” as well.

 

In terms of visual impact, under the artist’s industrious accumulation of unit after unit, his oeuvre during this period emits a powerful sense of organic energy. It is a state of sprawling, multiplying growth, a “body without organs” which is both singular and complete, which combines and dissembles all in one breath, broken down while interconnected. The visual myriad which call to mind beehives, swallow’s nests, oysters and coral reeves are reflected into being through Hsu Yunghsu’s own life experience and bodily instincts. Furthermore, as the previous two paragraphs described, for the artist himself, the creation of small-unit pieces evokes a special sensation of legacy; it is an exchange of units of life, planted onto the artwork bit by bit. Therefore, for Hsu Yunghsu, the feeling of life and existence is especially evident. Such is the Deleuzian bodiless sensation. Under the accumulation of time, the small units form art pieces while thriving, stacking, propagating and flowing. Even as the viewer observes these pieces, he can feel the amassing action, the layers and sprawling at work, the desire for life, leaping and rushing forward.

 

 

Conclusion

Hsu Yunghsu’s latest solo exhibition, Becoming Refrain, about to open at Tina Keng Gallery in Taipei in February of 2012, is a conceptual retrospective and culmination of the past six years of Hsu Yunghsu’s life. Within the scope of the exhibition, the concept of anti-clay and large- and small-unit forms will be presented with more clarity. While forms follow the artist’s will, and forms come into being through the body, the presentation of organic lines and varying volumes thrive in liberty under Hsu’s conceptually comprehensive expression. Thoughts correspond to actions, enriching each other. Freedom comes from a proactive drive and self-examination. Freedom is not casualness without discipline, but a truthful sense of liberty garnered from rising above limitations, and self-realization of the true essence of life and its circular nature. Every life experience is a work of art; it is just that with the concept of anti-clay, Hsu Yunghsu shapes his life the other way around, utilizing his own disintegrating body to create art works which narrate his everlasting, blooming life. And he does so with the ease