In this first series of works, Hsu takes stock of his own cultural heritage in the symbolic value of the spirit money he represents on canvass. He obviously delights in the painstaking realism of the representation of a very ordinary object, but the closer he gets to the object, the more abstract it becomes. He calls this “abstract realism,” and in works such as Full House, a stack of ghost money painted in extreme closeup and meticulous detail becomes an imaginative space for the viewer to contemplate lines, textures and light, the representative subject having been pushed into the background. In other works such as Palace, Hsu pulls back slightly and uses stacks of money to create an architectural space that evokes and comments on the Chinese priorities of family and home, as well as the inevitability of death and decay.
In a second room, Hsu presents a series of charcoal drawings that come across as somewhat conventional academic exercises in representations of space. Closer inspection reveals that Hsu is once again more interested in something that lies beyond the object depicted. The Lonely Loo (2003) is a study of surfaces, light and textures that makes the image of a public lavatory something supremely nuanced and faintly mysterious. His three-part series Lady’s Room (2006) takes this focus on space and texture one step further. The first panel depicts a rather decrepit lavatory in the same kind of painstaking care as can be found in The Lonely Loo, but then the second panel zooms into a section of wall around the lavatory window, and the third becomes an abstract of peeling paint, mold and damp as seen under a microscope.
Hsu writes in his introduction to the show that, “The existence of objects is forgotten because we tend to functionalize everything.” The paintings presented in Neglected Existence undermine this functional aspect of things, and reveal an underlying skein of being that is both banal and sublime.
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