On how to make multiple out of single: An essay written before Hsu Yunghsu’s 2015 solo exhibition Helios
Previously at the campus of Tainan National University of the Arts, I had an enjoyable experience of admiring Hsu Yunghsu’s large-scale artworks that took the new form he developed after 2006. However, I got no chance to know this artist par excellence personally all along until he was going to stage his solo exhibition at Double Square Gallery. We met each other in a small meeting room at the gallery, where Hsu elaborated on the genealogy of his works. During the greater part of the meeting, I just stared at the screen, reading the detailed profile of Hsu and his career contained in his personal website. I could not help but feel a visceral thrill out of the way in which the artist talked about his own works. Nonetheless, what touched me was not so much his positive and sincere attitude as the third person perspective he adopted when describing his arduous creative process. It seemed that the artist maintained critical distance from himself at that particular time. Such a sense of distance was by no means the result of the artist’s deliberate rationality. Hsu is an artist of great sensitivity who masters passionate artistic vocabulary, and, much to my surprise, he carefully refrained from letting his sensitivity run wild during our discussion. Throughout the interview, he did not use any fancy jargon or terminology but just plainly and straightforwardly introduced the trajectory of his career as an artist to me.
We may understand the evolution of Hsu’s works by reference to Liao Ren-Yi’s demarcation made on the basis of schools in Western art history: (1) Vitalism (1992-1997); (2) Surrealism (1997-2004); (3) Abstract Expressionism (2004-2005); and (4) Process Art (2004 to date).[1]
In general, Hsu’s works laid particular stress on modernist simplification during the first two phases (1992-2004). The simplified works tended to take the form of hybrids of organic gestalt and symbolic thinking. The features of Hsu’s works in this period nestled up against the basic orientation of Taiwan’s modern sculpture. Nevertheless, what is worth noticing is that the discourse of “modern sculpture” prevailed in this period exerted less influence on Hsu, who did not re-orientate himself towards visual art until the 1980s, than on several contentious issues such as “pedestal” (or “socle”) raised by the 1985 special exhibition on the modern sculpture of the Republic of China. Besides, Richard Lin’s return to Taiwan brought installation-related issues such as “specific site” into spotlight. Contrarily, Hsu’s works in this period invited social reflections rather than emphasized formal frameworks. In terms of content, Hsu’s works in this period bore a stronger similarity to those by the “Taipei Painting Society,” an iconic contemporary artist group established in the 1990s.
It was not until we drew such a comparison did we realize that it was a sculpture-based view on Hsu’s works. As far as the medium of Hsu’s works is concerned, clay is normally put under the category of “crafts” in the academic system of classification. However, Hsu’s works reflected no purposive nature of crafts. Due to the gap between clay-based artworks and ceramics, namely the gap that Hsu termed “anti-ceramics,” Liao had to coin the compound concept of “clay-based figurative art” to describe Hsu’s works.[2] Fortunately, the difficulty of finding a proper term offered us a key to grasping Hsu’s works that revolved around the axis of autonomy. Hsu began to create with clay in the 1980s, since when he has abode strictly by this specific medium. He derived the drive from nowhere but the modernist imagination of autonomy. In any event, such a modernist approach that was confined to a specific medium and constantly challenged its limitations simultaneously implied some social concerns. From these seemingly antithetical features, Hsu’s early works, namely those “ceramics” as handcrafts that were almost consigned to oblivion, implied a critical gap between themselves and their definitions, if you will. This gap also existed in between the artist and the discourse of “modern sculpture.” In sum, Hsu’s works in the first two phases tended to maintain equidistant relationships with all possible coordinates.
We may find that such a gap is bound to emerge in contextual comparisons if it is placed in a more general background. Although sculpture pedestals became a source of contention in Taiwan’s art community as early as in 1985, it was not until 1995 did Lian De-Cheng translate Rosalind Krauss’ book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths[3] that includes the essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” an extremely important text to the development of modern sculpture. That essay was written in 1978, and most of the minimalist artworks it mentioned were finished in the late 1960s, among which Richard Serra’s large-scale assemblies of sheet metal, a series collected permanently by Dia Art Foundation, profoundly and enduringly influenced Hsu’s subsequent works after he witnessed these tours de force in New Jersey in 2005. From the imperial perspective of such a globalized and dominant context of art, the gap that Hsu showed clearly exemplified the concept of “delayed modernity” formulated by Chen Chuan-Xing. However, if comparing Western modern/contemporary art contexts always implies the inevitable emergence of gaps, perhaps we should treat these contexts in an alternative way.
Shifting our focus from the reference to Western art history onto the trajectory of Hsu’s career as an artist, we find two distinguishing features that respectively touch upon the contextual construction of personal art history and the creative way of thinking on specific issues. First of all, individual artists’ creative contexts are almost equivalent in essence to the construction of personal art history if we recognize the inevitability of gaps among Western art contexts. It also implies that “reference” always bears the signature of reflexivity. After 2004, Hsu ushered in the phases of Abstract Expressionism and Process Art, which means that he laid greater stress on subjective thinking than on the completion of forms. Despite the similarity between the shift of Hsu’s focus and the development of Western modern/contemporary art history, subjective thinking brims with the second distinguishing feature; to wit, the creative way of thinking on specific issues (e.g. the body), only when it is placed in such a profoundly reflexive context.
Taking the series Abstract Fragments (2004-2005) as an example, it represents a short period in which Hsu created only a small number of works. However, it played a key role in his career. The series signified the change in Hsu’s creative style. The “metaphorical limbs”[4] faded away and were superseded by abstract and incomplete shapes. Hsu’s works in this period resembled the fragments extracted from the whole. If the temporality sealed in the complete forms of his previous works approximated to the classical time that flows eternally, these fragments would resemble a flash in the pan that creates a sense of velocity. In other words, time is no longer sealed in artworks, but externalized to make the artist’s intervention perceivable. The aesthetic modernity that treats time in this way undoubtedly dilutes subjects’ grandiose agency. It might be the cause of the indeterminacy in which body and medium infiltrate each other, a unique state emerged in Hsu’s subsequent works. For the artist in this period, “clay” was not so much the objective medium for artworks as the sustenance the artist drew to struggle with the world of art. Once the boundary between the medium and the subject who uses it is blurred, a rheological relationship of bodies would emerge and time would splinter in the endless struggle between the two.
In the phase that commenced in 2006, Hsu created a concatenation of works that Gong Jow-Jiun termed “large aperture” and “small aperture” while Sean C. S. Hu termed “large unit” and “small unit.” These series no longer take clear and definite forms or carry symbolic signifiers. Instead, they are either systematic juxtaposition of large-scale units (large aperture) or large-scale works composed of many small units (small aperture). Some works of the small aperture series were laid on the floor, while others were hung on the wall as if they were paintings. These works not only challenged the technical limitations of kilning but also pushed the artist to the limit of his physical energy, which was why many critics focused particularly on the laboring body that Hsu as the subject manifested through the process of creation, on which these critics made sentimental interpretations. If the viewers, when admiring the large-scale ceramic works that Hsu created after 2006, are able to recognize the fact that every detail of these works was finalized by the artist’s hands, these hard labor-based colossi would contrarily create a sense of sublimity.
On the one hand, such a contrast implies a bottom-up reversal of themes that informed us of the gap between Hsu’s large-scale works and the minimalism he yearns for, thereby bridged the negative gap referred to by the concept of “delayed modernity.” On the other hand, within the gap predestined in our thinking of contexts, the emergence of “body” serves as an essential aspect in addition to the reliance on the differentiation of creative intentions. Nevertheless, the body is not the labor-based one that touches the viewers deeply. Since the body lives simultaneously in the private and public spheres, what the body created actually transcends the confines of the labor-based relationship between the artist and his works. In terms of physical labor, the body appears in the public sphere. In terms of the sentiments that the artist devoted to clay, the body shifts to the private sphere.
Only from the level of body that lies amidst the private and public spheres can we understand why the works in the “large aperture” series are always juxtaposed and how the works in the “small aperture” series are constituted with units. Admiring Hsu’s ceramic works, we may feel being situated in a micro-city constructed by unknown organisms. The nest-like concaves of these organisms create ideal conditions for us to dwell. Meanwhile, they are connected with one another and therefore constitute sizeable chunks. Their respective organic structures show a non-person disposition. They are not a metaphor of body. These figurative objects per se are ownerless bodies. Whether they are or are not Hsu’s body is no longer a vital issue. If they are not personal belongings, no one would be entitled to claim the ownership of them.
The reason for these bodies to be bodies is that they already transcend the conventional values of media. The only thing we know for sure is that Hsu uses his body in the way that he utilizes clay, yet his body does not unilaterally dominate the medium of clay. Rather, the three interconnected elements, namely the artist, body, and clay, constitute an isomorphic axis, along which they metamorphose into one another through the rheological relationship they share. Thus, art becomes a form of life. It’s no wonder that Hsu was deeply inspired by “technology of self” (technique de soi), a concept that Michel Foucault proposed in his old age. Hsu demonstrated remarkable courage to invent himself as early as the time when he gave up zither and turned to ceramics. As far as I am concerned, the interpretation on “technology of self” may be riveting; however, it inevitably leaves us a number of puzzles in the process of contemplating Hsu’s works. In other words, these gaps, whether deliberately or inadvertently fostered, constitute poetic puzzles.
Since Hsu’s early career, his works have broken away from the nature of crafts. However, in the present phase in which Hsu transforms art into a form of life, his works ineluctably disintegrate into an alternative purposive “art documentation.”[5] From another aspect, we may find that Hsu’s works resemble the minimalist objects he admires. That is, these strikingly large objects referring to nothing, as usual, sternly stare at the viewers who stand in front of them. The sense of presence is therefore what every subject in this (artistic) situation must experience.[6] We may wonder that how the sense of presence Hsu created concurrently focuses on the visualization of the course of life and maintains the completeness of forms. The relationship between body and thing that Richard Lin’s minimalist style referred to in 1985 is a common fate of destruction.[7] By way of comparison, the presence highlighted by Hsu’s ceramic works thirty years later seems to be a kind of “excess” of life, or the excess of his physical labor. Besides, his works forthrightly make multiple out of single, which represents an excess that regards the groundless depletion of life as an easy job. His works survive the turbulent era exactly because of such depletion. They are no longer confined to Hsu’s life experiences because they have become multiple (or excessive). Perhaps this is the very reason why I felt that Hsu took a third person perspective to describe his own works.
[1] Liao Ren-Yi, “From humble dust to vast universe: The aesthetic implications of Hsu Yunghsu’s clay-based figurative art,” Becoming.Refrain, 2012, pp.6-12.
[2] “Along the axis of creation, I adopt the warmth of ‘clay’ as the carrier of my works and make ‘extremely large and extremely thin’ as the form of this carrier. However, I have no intention to subvert the nature of clay or challenge its limitations. Rather, I take advantage of the relativity of its traditional merits and regard my works as the ceramics distinct from ceramics, which I therefore defined as ‘anti-ceramics’.” Excerpted from Hsu’s statement “The transcendence of self and that of my artworks.”
[3] Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, trans. Lian De-Cheng, Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing 1995[1985].
[4] The term “metaphorical limbs” is derived from the interview with Hsu Yungshsu.
[5] Although the artwork as an “art documentation” inevitably undermines its own autonomy, it makes art a form of life, just as what Boris Groys terms the creation of art documentation: “Art documentation, by contrast, marks the attempt to use artistic media within art spaces to refer to life itself, that is, to a pure activity, to pure practice, to an artistic life, as it were, without wishing to present it directly. Art becomes a life form, whereas the artwork becomes non-art, a mere documentation of this life form. One could also say that art becomes biopolitical, because it begins to use artistic means to produce and document life as a pure activity.” See Boris Groys, Art Power, trans. Jau-Lan Guo and Wen-Kwen Liu, Taipei: Artist, 2015, pp. 82-83.
[6] However, according to the criticism of minimalism that Michael Fried expressed in his article “Art and Objecthood,” such a sense of presence originated from “the condition of non-art” of the artwork. The meaning of “the condition of non-art” in this context is what the coeval artists have been calling “objecthood.” The experience of admiring such kind of artworks “is of an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.” Fried further asserted that this is what he called “theatricality,” and “art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater.” Full text see Artforum 5 (June 1967), pp. 12—23。
[7] When Richard Lin won the First Prize of the “Chinese Modern Sculpture Exhibition” for his work “What’s Ahead?”, Lin stated that “I let the work become rusty in order to make it as beautiful as the nature. My intention is to ensure its eternal existence with mother earth.”