From Lowly Dust to the Grandeur of the Universe The Aesthetic Significance of Hsu Yunghsu’s Clay Sculptures

Author：Liao Jen-I

In the changing landscape of Taiwanese contemporary art, artists who work primarily in clay have been present from the start. They have conquered and claimed a magnificent land of their own, with the works of Hsu Yunghsu propelling expressive energy of the medium towards an awe-inspiring precipice.

Hsu is the kind of artist whose work moves the viewer at first sight. This is not simply because of the unique aesthetic resonance projected by the shapes of his pieces, but also because they serve as an account of each difficult trial the artist must endure in order to explore and overcome the limits of his own life energy and creativity. We can even say that each one of his pieces is shaped by blood, sweat and perseverance. Not only do Hsu’s ceramic works convey a maturity of individual style, Hsu’s attitude towards artistic creation and the aesthetic significance of his work have also been guiding Taiwanese contemporary ceramic art towards a expansive field of vision inundated in foresight.

The use of dirt or clay as a creative material has had a lengthy history in human civilization. In fact it was already in existence since prehistoric times. Historically speaking, ceramic art manifests as houseware for daily use and ritualistic instruments; it was not until the rise of modern art that the creation of ceramic work began veering towards non-practicality, towards artistic creation. Specifically in terms of the development of abstract art, ceramic art has had a hand in informing and enriching the form and content of creation. In Taiwan, ceramic art has also had a long, evolving history of development. Aside from artifacts from many archeological sites which bear witness to the use of clayware in prehistoric Taiwan, in Taiwanese aboriginal culture, clay-made instruments have taken on functional and sacred meanings. During the several hundred years from the early period of Han migration to the end of Japanese occupation, the status of clayware changed from instruments of daily living to artifacts of craftsmanship; as of mid-20th century, ever since Taiwanese society encountered the impact of modern art, the concept of clayware creation further extended from the status of a craft to that of plastic art.

During the decade preceding the end of the 20th century, as waves of contemporary artistic thought impacted the island nation of Taiwan, installation art, conceptual art and performance art had also been ushering clay-based plastic art into the age of contemporary art. It is exactly within this aesthetic wave where modern art transitioned to contemporary art that Hsu Yunghsu, as a Taiwanese artist who entered the realm of ceramic creation during the latter part of the 1980s, actualized his artistic practice and stance of life.

Hsu Yunghsu was born in Kaoshiung, Taiwan, in 1955. He graduated from the National Ping Tung Teacher’s College (now the Ping Tung University of Education) in 1975, having received general training in various areas of art. After graduation, aside from working as a teacher, he also served as a professional musician and music teacher. At this time, he excelled in the art of music performance, establishing the household reputation of a master instrumentalist. However, just as his musical performance career reached its peak, a new side of him craved the freedom to explore the meaning of existence through plastic creation. Thus, Hsu gave up the stability and prestige he had obtained, and marched down a different road of art.

We dare not investigate the challenges and suffering Hsu must have experienced when he decided to forsake music in favor of the study of clay molding. Still, we can no less imagine the slow process of reinvention his fingers must have gone through in order to accommodate the medium of clay. While an instrumentalist’s fingers suffer a due amount of damage against the resistance of strings, a ceramic artist must endure even more strenuous resistance, abrasions and erosions from clay, during the process of sculpting and shaping clay to his creative will. Similarly, the artist must develop the shapes and structure of his works while abiding to the conditions of the clay at hand. In this way, the track change from music to plastic art is not only a change in genre, but also a switch in artistic medium, but more importantly, a paradigm shift in the physicality and approach of creation. The artist’s tool of creation must extend from his fingers to the entire body, and even his posture must change from the elegant seated pose to that of a hard-working laborer. Hsu Yunghsu established his own ceramic studio in 1987 and in 1992, he sought the tutelage of ceramic artist Winnie Yang. He resigned from the teaching position he occupied for 22 years in 1998, and went back to square one in a completely different field, and devoted his full attention to making. In order to further develop the ability of critical introspection in both art creation and theory, he enrolled in the Graduate Institute of Applied Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts in 2003, and received a Masters degree in 2007 under the tutelage of Chang Ching Yuan.

While Hsu’s initial change in career trajectory towards ceramic art in 1987 brought hardship and loneliness, he began receiving exhibition invitations, both on the local and the international fronts, from 1992 on. Since then he has won numerous major awards and has maintained a rich record. Since 1996, Hsu has held over 20 solo exhibitions, with locations scattered all across the world, including China, Korea, Japan, Australia, United States, and Portugal, in addition to covering various public- and private-owned exhibition spaces in Taiwan.

Beyond Hsu’s stellar history of awards and exhibitions, what is clear is his persistence in the practice of artistic creation as well as his development in the conceptual backbone of each stage of his artistic career. These records are documentation of his artistic creations as well as his wounds, scars and self-transcendence as he throws his entire being, limbs and all, against the changing force of clay. As Hsu repeated receives commendations, he also surpasses his own efforts time after time. At each overtaking, Hsu also pushes the profundity and significance of his work up another conceptual height; and as he does so, he succeeds in propelling the significance of ceramic art towards a higher ground of thought, towards a grander vision. And so, in conducting a retrospective on Hsu’s creative history, we can see the process through which the ceramic art of Taiwan progressed from modern art to contemporary art. Through Hsu’s work over the last 20 years, we can divide the course of his plastic art career into four periods:

Vitalism Period: from 1992 to 1997. Surrealism Period: from 1997 to 2004. Abstract Expressionism Period: from 2004 to 2005. Process Art Period: from 2005 to the present.

Hsu’s Vitalism Period took place between 1992 and 1997. The topic of this period is “Drama for Life,” and the artworks can be separated into two categories: early-stage works developed from a single plastic element, and a series of drawings inspired from dance postures, rich in musicality.

Vitalism is a trend in modern sculpture which thrived in the 1930s. Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth are two of the movement’s representative artists. While the characteristics of Vitalism can sometimes be seen in sculpture of the classical era, the style really found its voice in modern abstract art, where an impression of vitality/ life force is often projected upon a generalized abstract shape of sculpture. Many of Henry Moore’s works, while no longer retaining a verisimilar outline of specific subject matter, can still evoke the feeling and status of life—such is the typical expression of Vitalism. Similarly, as the representative of another school of Vitalism, Barbara Hepworth utilized an even more streamlined style of sculpture, devoid of any hint of realistic figural significance, to present and recreate a tender and poetic state of being. In fact, amongst Taiwanese sculptors, the works of Yuyu Yang and Ju Ming also carry a touch of vitalistic characteristics, and such features are not unheard of in other Taiwanese artworks. Therefore, since Hsu is an artist who has been influenced by modern art, it is natural that we should find traces of vitalism in his earliest works.

Hsu’s Drama for Life series, just as its title suggests, focuses on the theatricality of shapes. Thus, while pieces in the first category depict a stand-alone existence of a single plastic element, they can be interpreted as the artist’s monologue. As for works in the second category, they are imbued with a certain sense of rhythm born of the artist’s musical past, a rhythm which is transformed and reapplied to dancing shapes so that the figures give off a conversational vitality of life .

During this period, the works of Hsu Yunghsu reveal the artist’s admiration and longing for a harmonious life.

Hsu’s Surrealism Period took place between 1997 and 2004. This particular style is mainly detectable from the series of works he named Places.

Within the trends of global artistic thought, Surrealism is one of the movements of Modern Art, taking place during the latter half of the 1920s, right as Europe underwent another wave of transformation in capitalism in the wake of post-WWI revitalization. Facing the social injustice of the era, the surrealists vented their disappointment in the status quo by manifesting in their works the thirst for subverting such a state of being. This is why their works often expresses dual points of view, maintaining the realism of shapes while twisting these realistic shapes to emphasize perversion. This is exactly what we see in Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti’s work.

Expanding upon the concept of theatricality, Hsu created a series of pieces shaped like chairs, given features of the human body with the exception of a head from 1999 onward. Within the next year, the artist elaborated on these humanoid chairs and created disparate sculptures and shapes. Of these, the first category displayed defined structures for the chairs, still without a head, while the second category added a human head and masked facial features to the distinct structure of the chair, and the third category of figures feature the same masked head, but instead of chairs, the structure evoked the upright human body.

His works of the period, in accordance to Surrealist tradition, are filled with biting, ironic social commentary despite a superficial sense of lighthearted humor. The pieces illuminate the loneliness of life and a sense of alienation amongst individuals, and call to mind Giacometti’s City Square series, which expresses the kind of isolation an individual feels when situated in a crowd. Such a sense of disquieted ambivalence of man stuck between nature and society is revealed when Hsu’s surrealist large-scale pieces are displayed in an empty, sparse landscape.

It is because of this series’ perceptiveness in understanding the human condition suffusing the latter half of the 20th century, Hsu’s works were featured in the international journal Ceramics: Art and Perception (2001, no. 45), in which the writer lauded Hsu for the visual understanding of the dynamics between society and an individual, and his dedication in presenting this concept in rich and organic sculptural variations with the medium of clay.

5. Hsu Yunghsu’s Abstract Expressionism Period took place during a brief stretch between 2004 and 2005. This style can be found in his Mythology series and some simpler plastic works which are seemingly fragmented or part of a bigger, unfinished whole.

While this period was brief in duration and features a scant amount of artworks, it is nonetheless a crucial step in our attempt to comprehend the development of Hsu’s creative process. This is because this period marks the moment when both subject matter and form took a turn for the non-figural in Hsu’s work.

From 1992 onward, Hsu’s works has concentrated on the molding of shapes, on creating objects with outer shells and distinct shapes, objects that often referenced concrete events, things or meanings outside of the work through simulation or symbolization. However, in 2004, his work began to exhibit a kind of rupture, a detachment from shape and outer shell that led to a loss of assigned identity for the art object until it no longer signified any concrete thing or meaning. Instead, the sculpted pieces developed their own identity from their individual states of being. This change is liberation both on the front of the sculptures and the artist’s creative point of view, since it signifies that Hsu has gone from being guided by his eyes to being guided by every part of his body. During this period, just as Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollack, who utilized automatism by standing over the canvas and allowing the paint to drip onto it, Hsu Yunghsu also allowed himself to explore different aspects of plastic art while adhering to an open perspective without limitation of specific shapes or figures.

From 2004 forth, Hsu has created a series of works simply marked by the dates of their creation. These pieces have no definite shape, nor distinguishable boundaries, but all appear to be thin, torn fragments, revealing a poetic emotionality. At the same time, the series called Mythology can be seen as a large installation art piece developed from these fragmented elements, culminating in the expression of chaos at the beginning of heaven and earth, of all creation.

At this point, Hsu Yunghsu broke away from the limits of conceptualization in physical space, and became the creator of an alternative, poetic space.

Having weathered the challenge of transitioning from sculpting shapes to sculpting non-shapes, Hsu seems to experience fully the liberation of his entire living being, and marches with bold strides into the magnificent plastic universe which now lies before our eyes. The pieces are almost all created by stacking and accumulation of the simplest single clay units, resulting in a gargantuan structure large enough to redefine space. The repetitive bodily labor imbued into the work through its creation, in this sense, makes the process of creation another basic, intrinsic element of the work.

Hsu’s Process Art Period can be found in works dated 2005 and later.

In 2007, when Hsu showcased this particular series at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts’ Creative Forum, the exhibition was titled Theatre of Clay. Presented in the form of installation art, this series also implicitly carries elements of conceptual art and performance art in its creative concept as well as process of creation.

This series features massive clay-based sculptures with a thinness that the artist molds and kiln fires himself. According to Hsu’s explanation, the pieces were all created to exceed the bodily limitations of the artist. What he hopes to overcome is not merely the limitations to the volume, nor the range of movement, but what he feels and understands about his own body. More importantly, as an artist, Hsu attempts to allow his body to escape from the confines of habit along with the expansion of the sculptures so that he may develop artistic originality and integrity unhindered by habit.

While we have stated repeatedly that Hsu’s works test the limitations of the body, it is significant to point out that we are unable to detect any element of the body, in the stricter sense, in his latest works. Instead of images, signs and symbols referring to the human body, or even concrete expressions of the artist’s own body, what we see is clay sculpture after clay sculpture created by stacking, molding into shape, and kiln firing.

During the process of creating these pieces, Hsu chose not to use any tools, but instead connected and stacked the clay nuggets one by one, circling along, with just his palms and fingers. With repeated kneading, squeezing and molding, the artist built up the height of the sculpture, keeping the thinness at a critical point, and allowing the sculpture to weather the challenge of weight during the process, to come upon an arbitrary structure and shape of the sculpture. These actions are akin to the silkworm’s production of raw silk: extracting an endless thread from the body in order to weave together a shape that did not exist before. While the silkworm functions upon an instinctive impetus of which end is to create a cocoon that envelopes the silkworm, Hsu’s creative impetus is not driven by unconscious instincts, but instead a deliberate choice to release instincts through a state of being without discernable goals. Still, the difference in the two acts does not invalidate the comparison, since the silkworm analogy can be used both to describe Hsu’s creative act as mortification of the flesh and to highlight the connection between the artist’s body and the medium of the artwork.

In Hsu’s creative process, his body merges the end product with clay. Following the lead of his hands, his whole body moves with the clay nuggets as they expand and accumulate on an oversized worktable. During the repetitions of full-body movement and molding/shaping finger movements, his physicality infects and merges with the clay. At the same time, the material has also carries the body of the artist through a perilous journey yet unknown to the artist. Hsu places his own body into the clay in exchange of the material’s transformation into sculpture. In the creative process, the movement of his two hands and that of his body are entangled. It is such an entanglement which transposes him into an unknown journey and allows him to feel his body develop a vivid scenario of existence beyond his previous experiences, through the mutual contact and infiltration between the clay and his two hands. The scenario of existence in question is both painful and amazing. His is a journey of uncertainty.

This uncertain journey, while full of risks, is also the fountain of artistic originality and ingenuity for a body brimming over with explosive energy for plastic art.

In contemporary art, many classic works move people by the element of uncertainty, allowing the viewer a clear and personal view of the artist as he/she strides toward the unknown. Eva Hesse, a famous contemporary artist, once created a piece with fiberglass, a material filled with variables in its production process of solidification to gas, which in turn transformed the space of her studio, allowing chance to dictate the irregular shapes they formed. Hesse’s work moves its viewers because it records her state of being and creative process, as revealed through her material of choice. In the book Passages in Modern Sculpture, aesthetic theorist Rosalind Krauss called this kind of art “process art.” Krauss points out that the focal concern of process art is the process of transformation in sculptures: How shapes are re-refined through dissolution, and rebuilt through accumulation. During the process of reconstruction, new shapes or artistic objects take on an anthropological meaning: that is, when the artist devotes attention to the material’s process of transformation, he/she is entering a self-created sculptural space, a state of being that is almost primal.

We can see the spirit of process art in Hsu Yunghsu’s work. As the sculpted shapes transform into being, the artist offers us a brand-new aesthetic experience. Such an aesthetic experience no longer adheres to pre-existing visual logic, but rather challenges it, so that with a lack of recognizable rules, we the viewers are able to reestablish an aesthetic approach, which focuses on the creative process. In other words, when faced with Hsu’s work, if we only focus on the shapes, all we will ever use are our eyes; however, if we can turn our attention from the shapes to the setting of creation for these shapes, our whole physical beings will follow the pieces down the rabbit hole, into a not-yet-defined world. That is to say, what the artist offers is the space and time which takes place within the parameters of his pieces.

Perhaps we are already situated inside a given space, but we are not necessarily part of its creation. Hsu’s work, on the other hand, stands within this preexisting space while at the same time redefining the space; moreover, it develops a space where one may escape from the world and seek solitude. These clay shapes have brought us to a space which we can re-define with our own bodies.

Or perhaps we are adrift, just going with the flow along another predetermined stream of time; still, as soon as we enter the scenario engendered by Hsu’s work, we discover another definition of time. Each repeated movement of the artist’s palms and fingers as they shape the clay has reserved in the clay both the emotional state of the fingers and the temporal progress of said emotional state. The artist’s sculptures are a reservoir of body-time weaved of pain and amazement. This is time defined and delineated by the artist with his own body, and thus it is able to bring us, the viewers, into a temporal experience entirely unlike any offered by our daily lives.

Hsu’s artistic creations are not only a challenge to surpass his own physical limitations, they are also taking us into a plane of existence, a life-scenario where we can redefine space and time, and rediscover the creativity of our bodies. Hsu Yunghsu’s work is both sculpture and a stance of life.

And with this boundary-traversing stance of life, Hsu Yunghsu will continue to transform the lowly dust of the world into the grandeur of a poetic universe.