Inch by Inch: Hsu Jui-Chien Solo Exhibition

How should a single day be weighed? How should the length of time be observed? How does life manifest itself within time? Could this spirituality — ineffable, abstract, yet substantial — be conveyed through art making? The accumulation of time might allow us to perceive the changes on the outside, but the depth of internal contemplation is indiscernible. Faced with the unknown span of life, the unknown composition of words, and the traces on the surface of the materials — just like the number of words squirreled away each day, the day will eventually come when one opens up.

The millennials are a highly globalized generation, and the most perplexed. The search for the self is oft relegated to an aimless self-inquiry, hidden in the everyday, if not engaged in history, politics, or global issues. However, we have not been free from the eyes of contemporary art: the mechanisms of exhibitions, for artists who work in specific art genres, could only allow them to present their art in the form of object. Their work, ever more elusive, cannot be displayed in its entirety.

Working dexterously with black iron and objects, Hsu Jui-Chien translates media and performed labor into a nuanced visual language. A visual language that he wields sometimes in a state of aphasia — fragmented, partial, comprising echoes of words and phrases in an unfinished sentence: these ghosts of a meaningful sentence, albeit abstract, expand the viewer’s imagination. The inherent charm of the materials is of particular interest to the artist, who is riveted by the strength and linearity of iron, the adaptability of tape, the thickness of a slate, the change in color of heated iron. The environment where the materials are transformed contributes to the interdependent relationship of the object and the space it inhabits.

Black iron affords the manifestation of the object. The artist sees the medium as a fundamental symbol of his practice: the choice and rearrangement of media suggests the space where the work is conceived, as well as the artist’s state of thinking. How the artist approaches the materials distinguishes the work from an everyday found object. Viewer participation is merely an allusion to this state of being. The artist is concerned with more than the media or the materials, but with building a relationship, where understanding is tacit without an immediate connection to the object itself.

Strenuous physical labor is the price one has to pay when working with black iron. Cutting, hammering, welding, and grinding, the artist sees the medium as a character in his visual narrative which imparts the artist’s way of seeing the world. The reinvention of the medium — beginning with toilsome effort and deafening noise, ending with cold and quiet — is a process brimming with profundity. Iron bars, joined by red-hot welding points, form lines that delineate internal and external realms in a repeated structure. The artist becomes more than a creator, but a vehicle with which to accomplish another form of himself: the work. What is the distance between the work’s inception and the viewer’s perception? Measuring the world with his body, Hsu Jui-Chien forges ahead inch by inch, as he navigates the land of creation.

Hsu Jui-Chien

Born in 1994 in Miaoli, Taiwan, Hsu Jui-Chien received his MFA and BFA from the Department of Sculpture, National Taiwan University of Arts, New Taipei City, Taiwan. Notable solo exhibitions include: Angle, Still Life, Perspective, Lightwell, Taipei, Taiwan (2022); and Sway 3mm, Taipei Dangdai, Taipei, Taiwan (2020). Group exhibitions include: Nets of Fragmented Memories, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan (2022); Places of Being — Space and Materiality in Taiwan’s Avant-garde Art, 1980–2021, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (2021); and Rehearsal Reversal — Theater Zone in Life, Juming Museum, New Taipei City, Taiwan (2019). He received the Challenger Award of 500 Young 2022, hosted by 500 Times magazine.