Playing with shadows: Hsu Yung-hsu’s art in a global context
A portrait of the artist, working clay
In 2015, a photograph was taken of the artist Hsu Yung-hsu’s studio in Tainan that offers insight into the creative process underlying the production of his magnificent ceramic installations. [FIG 1] It is a black-and-white image, shot from an elevated perspective, giving us a birds-eye view over the full-length of the expansive, rectangular floorspace. Lining the concrete walls on the far left are delicate clay clusters, knotted into the artist’s signature filigree of intricate, organic forms that are the building blocks of his sculptural assemblages. In the far-right foreground we see part of a towering two-metre-tall elliptical structure made up of thick, bone-white ribbons of porcelain; allowing us to glimpse the impressive scale of Hsu’s monumental series of work as well as the technical finesse implicit in their making. Occupying the centre of the photograph is a long table populated with greenware – small, still-soft, unfired objects shrouded in translucent plastic sheeting, like archaeological discoveries waiting to be examined.
Aside from these static entities, the studio appears to be a hive of activity. Two dozen or so figures populate the floorspace, forming a circuit around the central table; caught mid-stride as they move from one end of the room to the other, wielding tools or manipulating clay, heads bent in concentration over the objects in hand, their bodies blurred by movement. Like workers in a factory, the figures are all identically dressed, albeit in black T-shirts and jeans, and curiously, they each wear a white terry-cloth sweatband on their forehead, as though participating in a rigorous team sport. The uncanny similarity between the figures is unsettling, until we realise that what we are looking at is actually a multi-exposure shot. And so, all of the identical ‘workers’ that we see buzzing around the studio are actually just one person – the artist himself – captured at various moments in the process of working clay over an extended duration of time.
Indeed, the intense physiological effort and endurance required to shape the obdurate blocks of heavy, damp clay into such a vast quantity of impossibly light and delicate forms would seem to be a task for more than one individual alone. Yet, as the photograph reveals, it is Hsu who single-handedly assumes the burden of this labour. As a portrait of the artist at work, the image registers the intense level of skill, stamina and perseverance involved in the making of these sculptural wonders, rendering visible the tremendous time and energy that Hsu pours into each piece.
As the art historian Rosalind Krauss observed in her seminal essay on the American artist Richard Serra from 1986, the history of art has been ‘punctuated by famous portraits of the artist at work.’ The evocative photographic and filmic images of Picasso, Matisse and Pollock in their studios immediately come to mind here, each image telling of ‘larger movements of the artist’s personality, his persistence, his intuitiveness, his cunning, his triumph,’ in a way that also seems to encapsulate the artist’s entire oeuvre; beginning, middle and end. Positioning Serra both within and against this august genealogy of artists, Krauss focuses on a highly-charged black-and-white photograph of the artist in his studio, ‘helmeted, goggled, gas-masked’ as though ‘dressed for battle’, as he throws molten lead at an unseen target. For Krauss, this powerful portrait of the artist throwing lead upends the heroic edifice of Modernism for two reasons. The first is the very presence of the gas mask that quite literally effaces romanticised notions of artistic genius, expressivity and individuality; while also referencing the depersonalisation of industrial labour. The second is the fact that the actual work of art that Serra is seen working on is not actually captured in the photograph. All we see is Serra’s gesture – the act of making – and ‘an action deprived of an object’, Krauss reminds us, ‘has a rather special relation to time (…) the action simply acts, and acts, and acts.’ This presents a distinct challenge to the narrative teleology of modernism: stories may have beginnings, middles and ends, but not necessarily in that order.
The portrait of Hsu in his studio is similarly disruptive, for Hsu, as a crucial figure in Taiwanese art history, provides an interesting riposte to both the critical anxieties centred on the notion of ‘belated modernities’ outside of the normative Euro-American framework, as well as the fugit and ever-changing definitions of the ‘global contemporary’. Instead of the image of a singular, individual heroic figure wrestling with the work of art in a stilled or ‘pregnant’ moment, we find instead multiple versions of the artist at work, taken at various moments in the irreducible flux of time. Whereas Serra is pictured bellicosely ‘dressed for battle’ in a gasmask, goggles and helmet, Hsu appears altogether unprotected and unencumbered. The white sweatband that he wears on his forehead is not just practical, given the sheer physicality of his craft, but also alludes to the durational aspect of ceramic production as well as the artist’s indefatigable and holistic approach to art-making. At the age of 64, Hsu still actively participates in marathons around the world, and trains for these events by crossing vast distances in the countryside surrounding his studio several times a week. In many respects, the same reserves of physical strength, adaptability and endurance required to run long-distance have not only allowed him to continually push the boundaries of his artistic medium, but also enabled him to do so at his own measured pace, and in his own time.
The problem of form
Indeed, Hsu’s artistic career has been somewhat circuitous. Born in the port-city of Kaohsiung, southwest Taiwan, in 1955, Hsu spent his formative years studying at what is now the Ping Tung University of Education, whilst simultaneously training as a guzheng musician. By the time he graduated with a teaching degree in 1975, he had gained mastery of this challenging traditional plucked-string instrument and would go on to perform in several concerts to great critical acclaim. After he was introduced to ceramics by a friend, he began experimenting with the medium with the same level of determination and discipline he applied to his musical training. By 1986 he had started his own ceramic studio, and in 1992, began working under the tutelage of the acclaimed Taiwanese ceramicist Yang Wen-Ni. In 1998, at the age of 43, Hsu made the difficult decision to leave aside his altogether more stable career as a secondary school teacher and professional musician in order to fully devote himself to clay work. After attaining some success in this highly competitive field, Hsu enrolled at the Tainan University of the Arts in 2003 and at 48, became the oldest student to date to be accepted to the Master’s in Fine Art degree programme.
Compared to new media like photography and film, working with clay necessitates a huge investment on the part of the artist: one that is physical, psychological as well as material. Clay not only takes its toll on the body and mind of the artist who chooses to shape this unwieldly matter into form but also demands financial sacrifice, given the cost of purchasing this often-imported, weighty raw material, combined with the expense of firing it at extreme temperatures over a prolonged period of time. Even so, it is a delicate alchemy. The most minute changes to the constitution of the clay itself in its preparatory stages, a carelessness in its handling or lack of experience in its firing easily results in the work’s collapse within the kin. Thus, Hsu’s career change was an inherently risky enterprise with no guarantee of obvious returns, artistic or otherwise.
At this juncture, it is worth providing some context as to the period in which Hsu decided to focus solely on art-making by looking more closely at contemporary artistic developments in Taiwan, as well as the rest of the world in the 1990s and 2000s. The lifting of Martial Law in 1987 was a key moment in the history of Taiwanese society, politics and art; marking the end of forty years of dictatorship and igniting the search for an indigenous Taiwanese identity. The series of political reforms in the 1990s such as the the first democratically-elected presidential campaign in 1996 facilitated these shifts in an era coincident with the wider ‘global turn’ in the international artistic arena that prompted a surge of interest in art from the peripheries as well as the spread of biennials of contemporary art across the globe. Taiwan’s initial participation in the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1995 put the island nation on the global art map, while the historic 1996 Taipei Biennial organised by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum provided a catalyst for much-needed artistic debate and critical discourse centred on Taiwan’s national and artistic identity, questions of indigeneity and internationalism, as well as the role of art in a rapidly changing society.
As such, the artwork that received the most critical attention and scholarly debate in Taiwan and abroad in that period was that which was seen to directly respond to ‘to the socio-political climate of democratization, post-industrialization, and changing China-Taiwan relations.’ This often took the form of public, participatory and socially-engaged art projects that mobilised local communities through artistic intervention, ephemeral action, video and documentary practices; exemplified by artists like Chen Chieh-Jen, Wu Mali and Huang Po-Chih, whose work was also widely exhibited overseas. Meanwhile, artists across the world were adopting strategies of artistic appropriation, relational aesthetics and postmodern pastiche; producing large-scale, immersive, participatory and populist pieces that chimed with the growing consanguinity of the art world and neoliberal globalisation. The cosmopolitan Taiwanese artist Michael Lin, for example, became a firm fixture in international circuits through his expansive, decorative floor-pieces that referenced the kitschy floral aesthetic of Taiwanese domestic interiors and Taiwanese mass production, further blurring the boundaries between high art and popular culture.
While some saw the global expansion of the artworld since the late 1980s as a welcome, inclusive move that disrupted the Euro-American centricity of the artistic canon in the spirit of globalism and multiculturalism; others bemoaned it as the index of an incipient cultural homogeneity in which all signs of difference were increasingly subsumed under the flows of transcultural circulation and transnational exchange. A troubling consequence of these developments was the tacit demand placed on non-Euro-American artists to deliberately foreground their nationality, ethnicity, and socio-political position in order to sate the exoticising appetites of the global art market. Needless to say, artists from the peripheries seeking to make a name for themselves in the international arena were (and arguably still are) caught in a difficult position. Artists who chose to ironically exploit the iconicity of easily identifiable cultural and political referents in their work were accused of ‘selling out’ and ‘pandering to’ the market; whereas those who mainly focused on exploring the formal, material and conceptual dimensions of their practice in lieu of showcasing their cultural and ethnic origins were all too often seen as being merely ‘derivative’: belatedly and blindly adopting the lingua franca of the Euro-American avant-garde for commercial gain. Thus, as the art historian Joan Kee wryly put it, a question that has plagued non-Western artists since then has been: ‘why invest real thought into the problem of form when everyone just wants to know where you’re from?’
What this brief and by no means comprehensive overview of artistic development in the 1990s and 2000s suggests is that Hsu Yung-hsu’s decision to forge a career as a ceramic artist in this period was out of step with both the socially-oriented avant-garde practices prevalent within Taiwan at the time; as well as the exoticising demands placed on non-Euro-American artists in the ‘global contemporary’ arena. After all, Hsu’s ceramic work cannot be said to directly engage with the social-political issues that many Taiwanese artists have explored to great effect through the medium of documentary realism and public practice. Furthermore, the organic, ebullient forms that have come to define his sculptural assemblages are not immediately identifiable as ‘Taiwanese’ as such, and thus might be easily overshadowed by the ever-growing body of work that appeals to private collectors and public institutions hungry for easily recognisable markers of cultural difference. Instead, it is precisely the ‘problem of form’ that has been Hsu’s longstanding artistic concern.
In praise of hands
In his perceptive essay on Hsu’s oeuvre, the Taiwanese art historian Professor Liao Jen-I divides Hsu’s practice into five stages of formal development: Vitalism (1992-1997), Surrealism (1997-2004), Abstract Expressionism (2004-2005), Process Art (2005-2012) and Metaphysical Aesthetics (2012-now). While some might take issue with Liao’s decision to chronicle Hsu’s practice through the framework of Euro-American modernist and neo-avantgarde tendencies, Liao’s typology is nevertheless instructive. Up until 2005, Hsu created a pantheon of whimsical, biomorphic and sinewy sculptures, both small and large, imbued with a preternaturally confident lyricism befitting of an artist who had spent many years so finely attuned to the rhythms of music. One could certainly detect the influence of totemic modernist figures like Henry Moore (1898-1986), Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) and Jean Arp (1886-1966) in these works, but equally draw comparisons to the well-known Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming (b. 1938), or the Singaporean Ng Eng Teng (1934-2001), particularly in Hsu’s series of large-scale outdoor ceramic sculptures that probed the limits of figuration.
By the time he enrolled at the Tainan University of the Arts in 2003, Hsu had – under the influence of Professor Gong Jow-Jiun (the current Director of the Programme in Art Creation and Theory) – developed a keen interest in the work of structuralist, post-structuralist and phenomenological thinkers like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The early titles of Hsu’s work, such as the ‘Myth’ series in the early 2000s allude to the influence of these ideas in theory; yet, it was clear that Hsu was struggling to translate this research into practice. The varied array of ceramic forms in the ‘Myth’ series is suggestive of a plastic uncertainty; ranging from large-scale, outdoor atavistic explorations of the seated human figure to small, thoughtful, diminutive, celadon-coloured pieces contrastively draped onto blocks of well-worn wood. [Fig 2a and 2b – ‘Myth 4’ and ‘Myth 18’]
Soon thereafter, two separate events occurred in the same year that were to profoundly alter Hsu’s artistic methodology and above all, his formal vocabulary. At the time, Hsu was working on a series of smooth, leaf-like vessels of impossibly thin clay that almost resembled brushstrokes freed of the support of paper or canvas. Highly pigmented swathes of vermillion or violet tore through these three-dimensional surfaces, reminiscent of the work of Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) or Anish Kapoor (b.1954). The series, executed between 2004-2005, was indicative of Hsu’s growing interest in the history of art as well as the affect of the art object on the viewer, seen for instance in the contrast between the smooth assurance of surface and the violence of gestural incision, or the effect of different colours on our apprehension of space and depth. [Fig 3a and 3b – ‘2004-16’ and ‘2005-5’]
However, in 2005, Hsu was involved in a serious automobile accident that caused him to become all too aware of the fragility of the human body in an immediate and visceral way that disrupted any pretences towards intellectual reflection or optical contemplation. As he later wrote of the experience, ‘I returned to my studio and couldn’t sit comfortably. Frequently, the dread of death leapt into my thoughts, and this forced my hands into clay, repeated pushing and kneading, and then my feeling followed. The work gradually and steadily flowed out, one after the other.’
In the wake of the accident, Hsu instinctively took to working clay with his hands, kneading and shaping the pliable substance into manageable, palm-sized shapes in an almost compulsive gesture. This nervous habit came to have a therapeutic, almost meditative quality, and swiftly became a ritual of sorts that was later enfolded into his artistic practice. It was from this anxiety centred on the body that Hsu took leave of the supple, fluid and quasi-surreal forms that had defined his early practice, and began shaping the clay instead into small, roughly-hewn, cup-like vessels, riddled with the indexical markers of the artist’s physical presence – fingerprints pressed into shallow indentations, the flesh of clay dimpled, distorted and raised by the excitations of nervous energy. Each piece reverberates with a kinaesthetic energy that first passes from the hands of the artist into the material, which is then further charged by the heat of the kiln. Initially Hsu created these hand-held, marginal objects without ostensible purpose: they were merely a means of passing the time in his studio in the attempt to stave off ‘the dread of death’ that occupied his thoughts.
Indeed, as the philosopher Tim Ingold observed, the medium of clay immediately lends itself to metaphoric allusions to corporeality and indeed, mortality. After all, ceramics have been the earliest and most enduring manifestations of human culture and civilisation. Whether in the process of their handling and firing, their existence as functional objects or their afterlife as relics of the past, ceramic vessels are susceptible to the same kind of ‘chronic instability’ as the living body – continually threatened by ‘dissolution or metamorphosis’; demanding ‘vigilance and care’. In the words of the art historian Glenn R Brown, ‘the natural life of a functional ceramic vessel, like that of something literally alive, is fraught with risk. Scars on vessels – scratches, chips, cracks, discoloration – serve as evidence of engagement of risk and, therefore, speak of authentic experience.’ While Brown is referring to the ‘social life’ of quotidian ceramics here, his thoughts on how ceramic objects might ‘speak of authentic experience’ through the physical traces of manual labour, handling and use is also useful when considering Hsu’s artistic output in this period.
Although Hsu began creating these cup-like vessels in the wake of his accident in 2005, it was not until 2008 that he began to stack and meld them together into sculptural units. The first of these were rather diminutive in size. 2008-12, [Fig 4- 2008-12] for example is merely 29 centimetres tall and 53 centimetres in length, comprised of dozens of these palm-shaped units pressed together and fired at a high temperature into a gritty, muddy stoneware amalgam. The end result is both earthy and crude, but also alluringly delicate and organic, like a log overgrown with the ear-like protrusions of Auricularia mushrooms, or the black fungus commonly used in traditional Chinese medicine and cuisine.
These early hand-wrought part-objects had little to do with formal perfection or artistry; instead they are reminiscent of what the Surrealist George Bataille called l’informe – or ‘formlessness’. For Bataille, formlessness immediately subverts idealised notions of high art, returning it to the level of base materiality, the praxis of the bodily and its drives as well as the realm of the everyday. For the art historians Yves Alain-Bois and Rosalind Krauss who resuscitated Bataille’s intentionally ill-defined term for a well-known exhibition they curated at the Centre Pompidou in 1996 titled L’informe: mode d’emploi (Formless: A user’s guide), formlessness has a declassifying power – it is anti-form, a mere ‘set of operations’ that undoes and unmakes the precepts and pretentions of High Modernism itself.
A year later, in 2009, Hsu began to apply the technique to kaolin-rich clay, fired at even higher temperatures, resulting in multiple, irregular-shaped bone-white vessels that were not so much pressed and welded into each other than carefully layered, stacked and concatenated, each shell-like husk retaining its fragile shape. He continued to produce a series of bleached, matte porcelain structures that variously resemble nests of silkworm cocoons, or calcified agglomerations of white coral. [Fig 5a and 5b – 2011-38 and 2013-13]
If the earlier, muddy, malformed or indeed ‘formless’ experimentations with these structural units was born out of the artist’s own immediate anxieties centred on the fragility of the human body and his own mortality, then his later and ongoing series of delicate porcelain husks seems to suggest that through repetitive, manual action and sheer force of habit, the work of art had gradually been discharged of its psychic and traumatic burden through repeated action. Although each of the porcelain vessels are lighter than the stoneware pieces both in terms of their weight and colouration, they were combined into denser, more complex structures. Indeed, Hsu began stacking these part-objects together with increasingly high levels of architectonic awareness and skill. It is as if it was only by gaining mastery of the technique and material that Hsu was able to work through the ‘dread of death’ that had initially plagued him.
In 2018, Hsu created an undulating wall-piece, 290 centimetres high, 850 centimetres long and 40 centimetres deep, made up of layers of porcelain cups, interspersed with thick rivulets of flat clay ribbons impressed onto the surface [FIG 6 2018-15]. In spite of the heaviness of clay and the sheer amount of artistic labour and time that went into its making and engineering, the work appears impossibly light and impressionistic when mounted on a wall and viewed from afar. The experience is disorienting, like being lost in a forest and looking into the distance through a latticework of branches at a seemingly infinite number of leaves.
Viewing the work up close initiates a different range of affects. Unlike the turbid resilience and solidity of the muddy stoneware pieces produced in his earlier experimentations, the impossibly thin translucency of porcelain reintroduces the element of fragility – the treat of loss, collapse and brokenness – to our encounter with the work of art. At the same time, the artist’s action of repeatedly kneading and pressing the clay with his hands and fingers might be read as an assertion of his physical presence and being-in-the-world as a means of mitigating this threat. Through this, one might regard the work as testament to the very resilience of human life and creativity in the face of existential uncertainty. After all, Hsu quite literally imprints the clay with his own unique mark of identity in the process of its handling. The delicate patina of the artist’s partial fingerprints remain embedded onto the surface of each and every work, a mark of presence that not only endures the unbearable fire of the kiln, but is somehow strengthened by it.
Indeed, Hsu’s work has often been described as an art of endurance. The manual and tactile qualities of his practice – particularly evidenced in the variations of hand-shaped modular units – has been remarked upon by Liao Jen-I, who commented on the physical strain placed on the artist’s own body in adapting to the peculiar morphological demands of clay. In Liao’s words, we cannot imagine ‘the slow process of reinvention [Hsu’s] fingers have gone through in order to accommodate the medium of clay’, especially given Hsu’s decades-long training as a guzheng musician. As Liao pointed out, ‘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 (…) even his posture must change from the elegant seated pose to that of a hard-working labourer.’ While the photograph of the artist in his studio cited at the beginning of this text gives us a sense of the artist as ‘hard-working labourer’ very acutely, it cannot possibly capture the material intimacy of Hsu’s craft: the artist’s tactile responsiveness to the clay and the micro-actions centred in the palm of his hand and the pressure of his fingers.
Indeed, the tactility of facture and the reciprocity of touch between material and maker has long been the subject of critical interest in art history. In a chapter titled ‘In Praise of Hands’ from his well-known book The Life of Forms in Art (1934) the French art historian Henri Focillon discussed the qualities of the handmade in distinctly phenomenological terms:
Knowledge of the world demands a kind of tactile flair. Sight slips over the surface of the universe. The hand knows that an object has physical bulk, that it is smooth or rough, that it is not soldered to heaven or earth from which it appears to be inseparable. The hand’s action defines the cavity of space and the fullness of the objects that occupy it. Surface, volume, density and weight are not optical phenomena… he does not measure space with his eyes, but with his hands and feet. The sense of touch fills nature with mysterious forces. Without it, nature is like the pleasant landscapes of the magic lantern, slight, flat, and chimerical …
By contrasting the intuitive immediacy of touch, handling and feeling with the slippery opticality of sight, Focillon was questioning the primacy of vision, and with it, the scopic regimes that characterise the experience of modernity that have become even more pronounced in our contemporary, hyper-visual era. Whereas vision remains on the ‘surface’ of the universe, the probing hand, with its finely tuned sensory receptors and responsiveness to that which it holds, works through the material; coming into intimate contact with matter in a way that confuses the boundaries between inside and outside, surface and substance.
In placing emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between artist and object, maker and material, Focillon’s study also anticipated the phenomenological turn that would come to characterise later artistic developments, especially Minimalist and post-Minimalist practices in the late 1960s and 70s. In this period, particularly in the United States, artists began experimenting with the physical and experiential properties of space, time, movement, presence and process in the artistic encounter, as a means of contesting Modernism’s supremacy of vision. This interest in the sensory and phenomenological aspects of the artistic encounter is also characteristic of Hsu’s practice, particularly after 2005.
As mentioned previously, there were two events that took place that year that resulted in a crucial shift in Hsu’s artistic methodology and formal vocabulary. The first, as discussed above, was the artist’s automobile accident which led to his ongoing series of palm-shaped, modular units of pieced-together clay structures. The second was Hsu’s first-hand encounter with the work of Minimalist and post-Minimalist artists that led to a radical expansion of the spatio-temporal and phenomenological remit of his work.
Whilst on an artistic residency in Rochester in the United States, Hsu embarked on an impromptu road trip with another artist on the programme to visit Dia Art Foundation in Upper State New York. It was there that Hsu came into direct contact with the work of artists like Richard Serra (b.1939), Frank Sandback (1943-2003) and Michael Hiezer (b.1944). At the time, Hsu was not only still grappling with the aftermath of his accident but was also struggling to find a means of formal artistic expression that would resonate with the viewer beyond the ‘surface’ of things.
The encounter with Serra’s Torqued Ellipses (1996 -2000) in the permanent collection of the Dia Foundation was especially moving, in both senses of the word. Inspired by the curved shapes of Italian architect Francesco Borromini’s church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1646) in Rome, Serra’s work consists of a series of hot-rolled curved steel walls that conjoin into subtly narrowing and widening passageways – forming a monumental steel sculpture made up of several parts that is indeed architectural in its inspiration, scale and immersivity. For the viewer, who is unable to see the overarching shape of these serpentine planes, the experience of moving through it is disorientating as much as it is exhalating. The viewer enters one of these corridors, dwarfed by imposing curvilinear steel plates whose surface has been sandblasted and then left over a period of 8-10 years to form a thin layer of rust. Because we do not know where the work will take us, our experience of space and time is sharpened by a sense of precarity; making us all the more attuned to each and every minute change in the texture of our surrounds, as well as the subtle constrictions in the space between the top of each steel wall. At the same time, the experience of moving through the negative space carved out between these ponderous structures is light, almost buoyant: one flows through the work as if merely following the ebb and flow of a piece of stirring music. Or, as the art historian Hal Foster described it, ‘it is as if your body becomes its own rollercoaster, one tracked not up and down but around and around.’
For Hsu, Serra’s work represents the height of artistic achievement. Its formal impact and affect was quite unlike anything Hsu had encountered in person before. Yet, it also caused him a great deal of anxiety by making him all the more conscious of the challenges posed by his own medium. Had his decision to give everything up in pursuit of art been for nothing? Could clay ever hold its own against the scale and spectacle of industrially-produced materials? How might ceramics, with its longstanding associations of handicraft and utilitarianism, be used in an installatory format to mobilise the viewer and trigger a range of sensory and experiential affects? And even if he was able to achieve similarly remarkable aesthetic responses through clay, would he, as a Taiwanese ceramic artist, ever be able to step out of the shadow of artists like Serra, or other titans of the Euro-American art canon?
In praise of shadows
Upon his return to Taiwan, Hsu began to radically alter the scale and structure of his work, and soon discovered that he would not have to resort to new technologies or industrial means of production in order to expand upon the spatial and experiential remit of his sculptures. Instead, Hsu turned to one of the most fundamental methods of clay work that has been utilised in pottery-making in many parts of the world for millennia. One of the earliest examples of this shift in Hsu’s practice is 2006-1 [FIG 7 – 2006-1], which was also his graduation piece for his MFA from Tainan University. Working on a flat surface, Hsu first rolled out a thin rope of clay that he then moulded into a loosely ovoid shape on the ground, more than two metres tall and about half a metre wide. Hsu continued to coil a further twenty-eight lengths of clay on top of this foundation, using his fingers to press each coil together and to test the tensile limits of the structure as he built it up. The end result is an impossibly thin, wavering, ovoid wall, punctuated with irregularly-spaced gaping holes that signal where his fingers had torn through the clay in the process of its handling. The surface of the work is once again completely suffused by the mark of the artist’s fingerprints and hands as he worked his way along each coil, kneading and pressing the ropes of clay with repeated gestures so that the lengths appear knitted together, resembling some sort of roughly-hewn textile, or even, in a nod to Serra, rusted steel. Once fired, the piece is made to stand on its vertical axis so that it looms imposingly over the viewer.
Over the course of several months, Hsu retreated to his studio and conducted numerous experiments with different compositions of clay – mixing it with sand, paper and other minerals and pigments to maximise its elasticity, absorption, durability and strength. In this period, Hsu suffered uncountable failures. As each work is fired whole, the sculptures are especially prone to collapse within the kiln, so that hours – and even days – of strenuous physical labour involved in the act of rolling, coiling, and pressing the clay into these monolithic forms could be lost in a matter of seconds. While the notion of endurance is so often attributed to the process of making alone, it must also extend to the artist’s ability to come to terms with loss; to be able to pick up the pieces and begin again from scratch.
In December 2007, Hsu held his first exhibition in the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in his native city titled ‘Theatre of Clay’, featuring an impressive display of twenty-five new abstract sculptures made using the coil building technique. The exhibition heralded a new direction in his practice. In addition to the rust-like, burnt sienna hue of the aforementioned piece, Hsu also created a range of obsidian ellipses that appear like strange extra-terrestrial pods or portals, their surfaces darkly glinting as though hewn from the scorched alien matter of meteorites. [FIG 8a and b – Theatre of clay installation shots] The viewer was invited to wander through this small forest of light and dark sculptures, experiencing an ambivalent range of emotions. Some would have found the sculptures oddly soothing in their mineral sensuality and might even have felt compelled to step into the space of these almost-human-sized enclosures as one would a cave or nest. Others might have immediately recoiled at the textural complexity of their punctured surfaces, mottled and puckered like the thick hide of some alien lifeform. Either way, the work made its presence felt.
The title of the exhibition was perhaps also a nod to Hsu’s encounter with Minimalist and post-Minimalist installations during his trip to Dia Beacon, for it could be taken to reference one of the most important texts centred on the affect of such work that prompting a great deal of art historical debate. In 1967, the American art historian Michael Fried (b.1939) criticised the work of artists like Donald Judd (1928-1994) and Robert Morris (1931-2018) for their ‘theatricality’ – the idea that their work self-consciously solicits the engagement of the viewer through the sheer materiality of their presence; or their ‘objecthood’. For Fried, objecthood was different to art, because when one stands before a work of art, ‘a single brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be convinced of it forever.’ The challenge that Minimalist objects posed against this rarefied and absolute vision was that it put emphasis instead on the bodily experience of the viewer in the encounter with the work, thereby violating the quasi-sacred modernist tenet of artistic autonomy. In the words of the Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, ‘one is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial contexts.’ The viewer does not experience the work in a singular instant, but enters into a dialogic and physical interaction with the piece that unfolds over a duration of time as they walk around the exhibition space, regarding the work from different angles, under different conditions of light.
Needless to say, such conditions are relatively controlled in the rarefied environment of the ‘white cube’ gallery or museum space, and the viewer modifies his or her own behaviour in response to the institution’s protocols and restrictions. In 2009 and 2010 however, Hsu sought to bring his work to a wider public for the occasion of two separate outdoor installations held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei and a park in the Xinyi district of the city respectively [Fig 9a and b – 2009-59 and 2010-藝術在山左右01]. While most of Hsu’s sculptures are quite robust and able to withstand the wear and tear of fluctuating weather conditions, there were some concerns related to the structural capacity of the taller elliptical pieces to cope with potential physical interaction from the public. Instead of limiting and policing the public’s behaviour by cordoning off the work, or placing signs around it warning of potential risk, Hsu resorted to more subtle and gentle means of persuading the viewers to take care when moving around the installation. This he achieved by populating the grass around each of the taller sculptures with hundreds of smaller, looped white porcelain pieces. This phalanx of diminutive sculptures acted as a natural barrier between the public thoroughfare and the more fragile, taller works, without clouding the aesthetic experience of the installation with overt prohibitive and restrictive measures. Viewers were still able to approach the sculptures and interact with them, but the presence of the numerous smaller pieces with their delicate, arcing shapes were a quiet reminder to the public of the fragility of the materials used. The work is extraordinary – not only aesthetically, but also because it is suggestive of the trust that the artist places in the general public to be able to interact with the pieces on their own terms outside of the elite sanctuary of the space of the institution.
While Hsu is the first Taiwanese artist to thus mobilise the viewer through such large-scale abstract ceramic installations, questions concerning the phenomenological and experiential possibilities of art had already been the subject of critical interest in Taiwan since the 1980s. Two experimental exhibitions held in the Chunzhi Gallery in Taipei in 1984 and 1985 entitled Play of Space 異度空間 and Transcendimensional Space超 度空間 respectively featured site-specific installations by artists like Richard Lin (1933-2011), Tsong Pu (b. 1947), and Lai Chunchun (b.1953), who used quotidian and industrial materials arranged throughout the gallery space in a way that sought to deliberately mobilise and destabilise the viewer in the artistic encounter. Richard Lin went on to win a prestigious prize in the 1985 Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Sculpture in the People’s Republic of China held at the first official institution dedicated to modern and contemporary art, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM).
In her preface to the catalogue, the then-director Su Rui-ping praised the work of these post-Minimalist Taiwanese artists whose ‘elaborate techniques and deliberate designs’ aimed to ‘explore more possibilities in multidimensional space through the exploration of different materials.’ One of the jurors, Lü Ching-fu, further observed that under such conditions, ‘the dimensions of the work expands greatly (…) at the same time, the work becomes one with the audience. The audience can get into the space of the work and become part of it; the work can be extended into the living space of the spectator and become part of the environment.’ Lü would however go a step further, arguing that Lin’s work represented a particularly Chinese sensibility that stood in stark opposition to the moribund West: ‘pedestals and frames are the products of Western art of the salon and the “ivory tower”. Modern [Taiwanese] art tries to release the work from these restrictions. Lü would also go on to describe the work by post-Minimalist Taiwanese artists with reference to Taoist and Buddhist philosophical precepts, and sought to characterise these practices as indicative of a new ‘Chinese modernity’ with distinct anti-Western undertones.
The art historian and curator Felix Schoeber argued that by actively promoting these experimental practices, the new Taipei Fine Art Museum initiated a ‘programme of re-nationalisation of modern art that involved all levels of the ideological state apparatus: professors of academia, museum administrators, specialised media, especially art magazines, and last but not least, artists themselves who framed their work in nationalist terms. Indeed, this reactionary urge to differentiate local practice from the hegemonic frameworks of Western art history has been a critical concern in many parts of Asia throughout the 20th century, particularly in moments of social-political uncertainty; prompting a critical reassessment of what constitutes ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ in the first place.
In a short, evocative essay titled In Praise of Shadows written in 1933 – a year before Henri Focillon’s aforementioned book – the Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) took issue with Japan’s obsession with the rationalising principles of the European enlightenment that had dominated the preceding Meiji Era (1868-1912). Like many, Tanizaki observed that the symbol par excellence of the West’s fixation with modernity, technology and progress was light itself. As he put it,
… the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light – his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow (…) we Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surrounds we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are (…) if light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.
In his essay, Tanizaki provided numerous examples of how shadows are integral to the ‘Oriental’ aesthetic experience, citing a range of phenomena and their affects that range from Japanese architecture and origami paper to Noh and ceramics. As he saw it, the Japanese appreciation for the subtle, changing, elusive order of shadows should be celebrated as a form of an indigenous sensibility as well as a means of quiet resistance against the technological and militaristic assault of Western colonialism that was beginning to have a persuasive ideological impact on Japan’s own growing expansionist ambitions.
In spite of its prescience with regards to Japanese imperialism, Tanizaki’s essay has been criticised for its perceived ‘self-Orientalism’ as well as the binary opposition it sets up between East and West, tradition and progress – though such a view obscures the playfulness of Tanizaki’s light satirical tone in dealing with these weighty cross-cultural comparisons. Indeed, Tanizaki’s text can be read as an ironic riposte to the well-known allegory of Plato’s cave, which has so often been cited in ‘Western’ art historical terms as a stark metaphor for the duplicity of images and the false consciousness of ideology. Despite its perceived flaws, the essay underlines the fundamental ‘Manichean delirium’ of the colonial enterprise, which has more recently been redeployed by post-colonial thinkers as a strategy of resistance. From the late 1960s, the Martiniquan cultural theorist and poet Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) famously championed the ‘right to opacity’. As he stirringly phrased it, ‘there’s a basic injustice in the worldwide spread of the transparency and the projection of Western thought. Why must we evaluate people on the scale of the transparency of ideas proposed by the West? … As far as I’m concerned, a person has the right to be opaque.’ This is reminiscent of the text cited earlier by Joan Kee, who posed the question, ‘why invest real thought in form if everyone just wants to know where you’re from?’ For non-Western artists, the urgent desire to achieve maximum visibility on one’s own terms– to finally be seen, acknowledged and celebrated in the multifocal light of difference – was crucial in order to once and for all step out of the shadows of predominantly Euro-American canon or other monolithic frameworks. At the same time, the right to be opaque – to not feel pressurised or compelled to disclose one’s specific ethnic, cultural and socio-political bearings through one’s art and thereby not facilitate the shaping of clear-cut, easy boundaries between self and other, centre and periphery, is a right that must be upheld. In the context of Taiwan – a nation that has existed in the shadow of numerous colonial enterprises since the late 1700s – Glissant’s politically-charged statements are particularly resonant.
A world made light
In a publication titled, ‘Taiwan Ceramics as a Mirror of Taiwan History and its National Culture Shift’, Frank Muyard proposed that if nations can be considered ‘accidents’ of history that are the result of specific contexts and events, the development of Taiwanese ceramics is ‘also a kind of historical accident’ and ‘a historical outcome that strongly reflects the socio-historical incidents and events that transformed the island into the twenty-first century’s Taiwan that we know today.’ Indeed, the development of ceramics, particularly in the region, cannot be so easily prised apart from questions of national, cultural and artistic identity. After all, since at least the 18th century, porcelain – the most highly prized ceramic – has simply been referred to as ‘China’ in the English-speaking world. The material’s symbolic association with a monolithic Chinese culture in the context of Taiwan is problematic to say the least, given the political struggles played out on the multi-ethnic island between at least three different nationalisms – Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese – in the last century alone.
Muyard’s study focuses on how different phases of ceramic production since the 17th century have been inextricably linked to wider geopolitical and economic events. To cite a more recent example in this historical trajectory, the mass production of utilitarian, low-and middle value ceramics and porcelain for export was a thriving industry backed by government support in Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1970s, but this gradually shifted to Mainland China after it re-opened its doors to foreign trade and investment from the 1980s onwards. It was certainly not the only industry to do so, creating a host of social and economic concerns as factories shut down and jobs were lost.
Nevertheless, the technological knowledge and supply networks for equipment and material established by the manufacturing industry paved the way for the development of ‘modern ceramic art’ in Taiwan as an autonomous phenomenon distinct from mass-produced utilitarian vessels. In the 1980s, the rise of the middle class and a greater international influence towards the end of Martial Law not only triggered a surge of interest in contemporary, experimental and avant-garde practices as mentioned previously, but also saw an increase in official ceramics competitions and exhibitions. Muyard argues that since the 1990s, ‘the combined effects of a focus on local culture and identity and of the internationalisation of the profession (…) accelerated the “Taiwanisation” of the local ceramic art and its transformation into a new “national” art form.’ The state’s endorsement and institutionalisation of the ceramic arts was cemented by the creation of the Yingge Ceramics Museum that opened in November 2000 as the first county-level specialised museum in Taiwan.
While the greater support for and interest in ceramics as an autonomous art form in the 1980s and 1990s no doubt benefitted many artists working with the medium, including Hsu; his practice cannot be said to embody a ‘national form’. Instead, he has deliberately sought to break from the stylistic conventions of ‘Taiwanese ceramics’ in favour of a transhistorical and transcultural aesthetic in dialogue with both local and global art historical and theoretical currents; focusing on broader questions centred on temporality, materiality, the act of making and how art acts upon the viewer; in a way that might be seen to productively ‘facilitate dialogues between artworks that might otherwise lie at opposite ends of the world.’
It is arguable that Hsu’s transnational sensibility speaks more eloquently of the specific locality of his native city of Kaohsiung than it can be said to reflect a homogenous ‘national’ position. The area has a particularly rich history that dates back to at least the Neolithic period, evidenced by the archaeological ruins of the southern-bicoastal Fengbitou Culture (4500-2000 BCE) that was excavated in the Linyuan district of Kaohsiung during the Japanese colonial era; known for its fine red cord-marked pottery and agricultural stone tools. The fact that such cord-marked earthenware has been found throughout Taiwan, southeast China and North Vietnam has been the source of intense debate. The archaeologist Wilheilm Solheim has famously argued that this pattern of distribution is indicative of the cultural spread of what he called the ‘Nusanto Maritime Trading Network’ that developed between sea-faring Austronesians in the region beginning roughly around 5000 BCE, thus emphasising the indigenous connections between Taiwan and a wider Pan-Asian cultural identity.
Taiwanese ceramics might well be a ‘mirror’ of Taiwanese history and its national and cultural shifts, but the reflections we see in mirrors are rarely true to life. Depending on how light is refracted off its surface as well as the shape and texture of its planes, a mirror can distort our view of the world or allow us to see things from different angles and perspectives; as in a rear-view mirror or a hall of mirrors.
For Hsu, an artist who spent his formative years experiencing the turbulent ‘White Terror’ of Martial Law, the idea that art should have a direct political message or represent a ‘national’ character is anathema. This is not to suggest that he simply upholds the old mantra of ‘art for art’s sake’, but that for him, the experience of art and artmaking should not carry with it the weight of the world. It is tempting here to consider the ‘lightness’ of Hsu’s work in relation to the elusive Buddhist concept of ‘空’ – emptiness or void; as in the well-known aphorism in the Heart Sutra: ‘Form does not differ from the void, and the void does not differ from the form. Form is void and void is form; the same is true for feelings, perceptions, volitions and consciousness.’ Yet, to consider Hsu’s practice in purely Eastern philosophical terms would again run the risk of reverting to a binarism between east and west that would not do justice to the transcultural tenor of Hsu’s work.
Yet, it is useful to return to Tanizaki’s text again here, in order to draw out the ambivalent tensions in Hsu’s practice. At the time when Tanizaki was writing in the early 1930s, Taiwan had already been a Japanese colony for almost two decades and would remain so until the end of the Second World War. It is evident that the proprietary term ‘we Orientals’ that he uses throughout the essay – ironically or not – is far less black-and-white than it seems. Yet, in its praise of shadows, Tanizaki’s emphasis is ultimately not on the polarities of darkness and light but the shades of grey in-between, teasing out the symbiotic relationship between seemingly oppositional categories. It is precisely the dialectical interplay between light and shadow that gives our understanding and experience of the world its nuance and depth.
In focusing on the poetics of shadow-play, Tanizaki, like Hsu, also draws into focus the quiet presence of the everyday objects, textures and forms that stand in the way of the light, causing us to question the solidity and surety of the things that at first appear sharply defined, singular and autonomous. After all, the appearance of shadows is contingent on numerous fluid, ever shifting factors ranging from the boundlessly atmospheric to the most minute: fluctuating meteorological conditions; the presence, shape and materiality of the objects we build and gather around us; as well as one’s own perspective and position with respect to these ephemeral as well as objective phenomena. All of these subtle variations, like music, bring the world to light in countlessly different ways.
1. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Richard Serra/Sculpture’ Richard Serra/Sculpture. ed. Rosalind Krauss, (New York: Museum of Modern Art) 1986, p 16.
2. Krauss, p 16.
3. See, for instance, Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza. Eds. Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (New Haven: Yale University Press) 2014; and Hans Belting, et al. The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. (Cambridge MA: MIT Press) 2013.
4. See Wei Chu-Chiun, ‘From National Art to Critical Globalism’ Third Text Vol 27, Issue 4: 2013, pp 470-484; and Tsai, Hong-Ming ‘Patchwork memory – mending the pieces’ in Taipei Biennial: The Quest for Identity. Exh Cat. (Taipei: Taipei Fine Art Museum) 1996, pp. 22-43.
5. See Lu Pei-Yi, ‘Three Approaches to Socially-Engaged Art in Taiwan’ Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 15, no 6, 2016, pp 91-101.
6. For a more detailed account of these developments, see Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated. (London:Verso) 2004.
7. Partha Mitter offers a cogent discussion of these developments in Partha Mitter, ‘Modern Global Art and its Discontents’ in Decentring the Avant-garde (Leiden: Brill) 2014.
8. Joan Kee. ‘Form in the service of the global’, Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present eds, Alexander Dumbadze & Suzanne Hudson (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell) 2013, p 98.
9. Liao Jen-I. ‘From Lowly Dust to the Grandeur of the Universe – The Aesthetic Significance of Hsu Yunghsu’s Clay Sculptures’ in Becoming. Refrain: Hsu Yunghsu Solo Exhibition. (Taipei: Tina Keng Gallery) 2012. Pp 97-129.
10. Hsu Yung-hsu, Transcending Boundaries. Tainan National University of the Arts Master’s Dissertation. [DATE] quoted in Sophia S.T. Wen, ‘Travelling through Emptiness – Hsu Yung-hsu’s Minimalist Expressions’ in Hsu Yung-hsu: Theatre of Clay Exh. Cat (Kaohsiung: Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts) 2007, pp 12-17, p 13.
11. Interview with the author, Tainan, 15 May 2019.
12. Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecuture (2013). p 94
13. Glenn R. Brown, ‘Invention, Interaction and the Will to Preserve’ Ceramics Research Centre: University of Westminster, available online: https://cream.ac.uk/ceramics-research-centre-uk/essay-series/contemporary-essay-5-glen-r-brown/ Accessed 20/6/19.
14. Yves Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, Formless: A User’s Guide (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press) 1997.
15. Liao Jen-I, 2012, p 98,
16. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art trans. Charles B Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books) 1989, p 170.
17. Focillon’s student, the American George Kubler, would also go on to write a volume entitled The Shape of Time that would have a profound effect on Minimalist artists like Robert Smithson, Fred Sandback and others. See Pamela M Lee, ‘Ultramoderne, or, how George Kubler stole the time in 1960s Art’ in Chronotopia: On time in the art of the 1960s. (Cambridge MA: MIT Press) 2004.
18. Hal Foster, ‘Torques and toruses’ in Richard Serra: Torqued Spirals, Toruses and Spheres. (New York: Gagosian Gallery), 2001, p 9.
19. Interview with the author. Tainan, 15 May 2019.
20. Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood : Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. P 167
21. Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture Part 3’ Artforum 1967, Vol 5, no 10, pp 24-29, p 25.
22. Su Rui-ping, ‘Preface’ in 1985 Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Sculpture in the Republioc of Chian, Taipei Fine Arts Museum exh Cat, (Taipei: TFAM), 1985, p 2.
23. Lu Chin-fu, ‘Farewell pedestal, back to the public square,’ in 1985 Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Sculpture in the Republic of Chian, Taipei Fine Arts Museum exh Cat, (Taipei: TFAM), 1985, p 10.
24. Lu Chin-fu, 1985, p 10.
25. Felix Schoeber. Modernity, nationalism and global marginalisation: representing the nation in contemporary Taiwanese art exhibitions. Unpublished dissertation, University of Westminster, 2014. Pp 103-4.
26. Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows trans. Thomas J Harper, (Stony Brooks CT: Leete Island Books) 1977, p 31.
27. See Viktor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Press) 1997.
28. Manthia Diawara, ‘Conversation with Edouard Glissant aboard the Queen Mary II’ (August 2009) available online: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/csis-2/blackatlantic/research/Diawara_text_defined.pdf (accessed 1/11/2019)
29. Frank Muyard, ‘Taiwan Ceramics as a Mirror of Taiwan History and its National Culture Shift’ in Objects, Heritage and Cultural Identity, Ed. Frank Muyard, Liang-Kai Chou and Serge Dreyer (Taipei: Taiwan Historica) 2009, p 391.
30. See Chen, Hsin-hsiung. Taoci Taiwan [Taiwan’s Ceramics]. (Taichung: Chen Hsing Press) 2003.
31. See Hsieh, Tung-shan, Taiwan xiandai taoyi fazhanshi [A history of Modern Taiwanese Ceramics] (Taipei: Artist Press) 2005.
32. Muyard, 2009, p 405.
33. Kee, 2013, p 103.
34. See Jiao Tianlong, The Neolithic of Southeast China: Cultural Transformation and Regional Interaction on the Coast’ (Amhurst NY: Cambria Press) 2007, pp 101-102.
35. Solheim, Wilheim G, ‘Taiwan, coastal South China and northern Viet Nam and the Nusanto Matirime Trading Network.’ Journal of East Asian Archaeology 2(1-2), 2000 pp 273-284; and Solheim, Wilheim G, ‘’Southeast Asian earthenware pottery and its spread’, Earthenware in Southeast Asia: 1-21. (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press) 2003.
36. Interview with the author, Tainan, 15 May 2019.
37. See Donald S. Lopez, Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra. (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 1998.