Miniaturen—Hsu Yunghsu Solo Exhibition
Hsu Yunghsu sees his own body as his creative instrument and fuses great resolution and perseverance into his pottery art, focusing on creating a dialogue between body and artwork. Merging his self and body as one when working with the pottery clay, Hsu employs bodily senses such as perception, tactile sense, and the sense of pain to interact with the world in the pottery structure and construct his works.
Through personally conducting elaborate, highly labor-intensive procedures and with perfect control of the firing in the kiln that requires exact timing, the artist achieves total unison with his art and produces the purest sculptures. The constant constructing and deconstructing process transforms the originally thick and heavy porcelain and pottery clay into sculptures of extremely light and thin lines and forms, and creates the contrast that materializes the innovative perspective of Hsu's pottery work. Therefore, audience is able to witness incredibly "large-scale" and "thin" works rarely found in pottery. "Transcend—to transcend life from life, artistic creation from itself, and life from artistic creation." This is Hsu's starting point and belief, through which he has engaged himself in unending challenge, hoping to surmount each and every limit in life and his journey in art.
Imbuing his work with his focused consciousness, body and life, Hsu uses elaborate techniques such as the vocabularies of constant flowing, repeating and compiling to create every work. The material, embodying the physicality of the artist, seems to follow the instinct of a living being, continuously interweaving and piling up to build "nests" and form "apertures." It seems that the works proliferate from the artist's body, growing instinctually through his thinking while constituting a non-temporal space. For Hsu, this sense of life and existence is especially vivid.
Hsu transforms pottery and ceramics that should have been thick and hefty into works that illustrate his life experience through absolute autonomous movement of his body. They are powerfully biological and original, delineating a state of proliferation and pervasion. They are unitary and integral, merging while dissolving, breaking up yet bonding as one. It is the eruption of life's desire, the surge of bursting brilliance.
Hsu Yunghsu
Hsu has won the first prize of the 8th International Ceramics Competition, Mino, Japan, and his works have been exhibited in the United States, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Australia, Singapore, etc.
