Hsu Yinling

The Taiwanese art climate has been widely characterized by its substantive and multi-faceted development. Its environment has become home to many a forward-looking and experienced art collector as well as cultivated a group of clear-eyed and stylistically distinct artists. This generation of modern artists has enjoyed the luxuries of a certain freedom – exempt from large burdens of history, the confinements of strict parties or schools of thought, or by the principles of a particular movement, they are free to focus on the milieu of their own lives, to find meaning through their personal observations of the world or from within. This sale is dedicated to introducing two outstanding up-and-coming artists of this new generation to the collecting world: Huang Hai-Hsin and Hsu Yinling. Both artists are women born after the 1980s, equipped with solid art school training and exhibition experience, and familiar with the pulse and language of the international art world. They are distinguished by their keen and honest brushstrokes, and their seemingly humble depictions that contain vast meaning as they interpret the face of the current era.

Born in 1984, Huang Hai-Hsin graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the National Taipei University of Education, and later enrolled at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn, having achieved a remarkable level of recognition and presence among for an artist of her age. The content of her paintings is often derived from the characters and scenes from daily news found in print or electronic media. In her paintings, “It is easy to grasp a sensation of failure or desolation arising from a scene that from the surface appears honorable, but possesses some nebulous element of something gone askew…the scenes she chooses often appear insignificant, banal, yet subtly communicate the particular atmosphere of current-day Taiwan. This subtlety comes from form, as well as content.”¹ Huang Hai-Hsin expertly slices through a specific plane of time and space, taking the memories and shared experience of a generation and overthrowing them, then reassembling and reconstructing them to express her individual perspective through which she sees the world. Through meticulous distortions of images, she presents an unnamable tension and disquiet.

“Huang Hai-Hsin is sensitive to those absurd moments in life. The ordinary and the banal, those things we’ve become habituated to and regard as normal, are really not so normal.”² The dark humor in the painting is not comedy for the sake of a cheap laugh. Instead, Huang Hai-Hsin is unveiling the darkness lurking in the scary corners of the matter-of-fact, the tedium of the everyday, and yanking them out with uncanny timing. Through exposing the true essence of these scenes, revealing a nervousness and tension that surpasses the ordinary, the artist’s work leaves the viewer at a loss – knowing not whether to laugh or cry.

Happy Holiday: Silent Night (Lot 759) is a Christmas celebration, a scene which at first glance exudes glee and merriment, yet soon reveals an undercurrent of turbulence. The interaction among the members of the family is peculiar, the lights on the Christmas tree nearly aflame. “Moments of extreme joy are always shackled to the loneliness and desolation that follows. Those moments of joy thus seem to contain a furtive unsettling element.” The act of the hands over the eyes comes from the artist’s childhood experience of air drills. “These were drills in preparation for calamity, yet every time there would be an atmosphere of excitement.” This strange feeling lingered, and became one of Huang Hai-Hsin’s defining symbols.

Which is the true reality: the lurid realism portrayed by the surrealist brush of the artist, or the halcyon scenes that appear in newspapers and on the television? For Huang Hai-Hsin, art creation is an excavation of the misery and sadness of reality. “I think it’s important to introduce the feeling of the tragicomic. To reflect a particular feeling of frustration, yet with an element of subtle resignation. That’s closer to the reality of life, I think.”³ Huang Hai-Hsin’s seemingly coarse and crude portrayals are in actuality a frank inquiry, a pinpointed prick at the heart of the matter, which are irresistibly magnetic, drawing the viewer in.

Born in 1987, Hsu Yiling is a graduate of the Masters program at the Taipei National University of the Arts, and currently lives in Taipei, where she is actively involved in creating art, crossing over to the mediums of performance, print, and music videos. Multi-talented, her work has garnered much praise and attention. Close in age, Hsu Yiling and Huang Hai-Hsin are friends, both artists gifted in the craft of storytelling. If Huang Hai-Hsin’s work reflects the manifold faces of the world, then Hsu Yiling’s paintings are rich with narration, scenes of heavy drama, approaching the mysterious realm of the fable.

The lot on offer, Here is Where We Meet (Lot 760), was created in 2014, when Hsu Yiling was at the New York ISCP Residency Program. It was part of a series, All Happy Returns. All of the works in the series revolve around a character conjured by the artist, a taxidermist unable to experience any emotion, cut off from the feeling of belonging that blossoms from love and relationships with other human beings. The taxidermist’s solution is to physicalize these emotions and abstract relationships, by collecting bits and pieces of items from other people’s lives, and assigning his own meaning to them, constructing them into all types of forms and emotions, in a self-education of humanity’s different experiences.

The role of this taxidermist deserves some cogitation. It is clearly an alter-ego of the artist Hsu Yiling. Hsu Yiling’s creations have always been rooted in a desire to portray behavior and psychological conditions of humans. At the conception stage of each series, she imagines a stage, creates a character, then uses this person as the perspective through which she observes the society we live in. And this society is an amplification of the self, while the smaller self dwells in a constant push-and-pull with various elements of this larger environment. A good artist must possess the ability to observe rationally and impassively, finding answers or elements of memory to inject into art, to render the spirit, the emotions, and the conceit of the abstract onto the canvas. Much like the taxidermist, bestowing his own deficiency with new life. Hsu Yiling epitomizes this very ability.

The scene depicted in Here is Where We Meet is that of a restaurant Hsu Yiling frequented in New York, a restaurant opened by Spanish immigrants. In speaking about this painting, Hsu Yiling once said that the exterior of the restaurant was styled in an ethnic way, while the inside was mysterious, like the experience of immigration itself. A vast space was hidden within its depths, with a slight disarray that hinted at the scars and traces of its inhabitants, a preservation of the unique immigrant experience: the danger and survival, the fear and refuge – these juxtapositions are the very portrayal of societal loneliness. The taxidermist is content to hide here, imagining the countless lives that have now entered his own life. And in the process of appreciating this painting, we seemingly experience the deficiencies of humanity, and the profound feeling of loneliness.

1 Weak Painting, Garden City Publishing Ltd., 2009

2 2000s Taiwanese Painters, Artists Publishing Co., 2013

3 refer to 2