Drawing From Monday: So Yo Hen solo exhibition

It is difficult to define So Yo Hen’s creative journey as either linear or binary. His work spans a wide range of experiences and expressions: it includes the frenetic sketches from his early days of pairing with strangers in online chatrooms, and his independent music label “Indi Indi,” which features the voice of marginalized individuals with “their insignificant sounds.” His piece Hua-shan-qiang (2013) draws on Taiwanese funeral rituals and paper craft to navigate the realms of life and death, blended with political reflections on Taiwan’s colonial history and status quo. Plaster Gong (2017) resonates with the fragile sounds of Taiwan’s modern identity. The intimate sculpture from the time spent with his sons, encapsulated in the warm nighttime exchange, Goodnight, see you later. (2021), evokes familial bond. In Taman-taman (Park) (2024), he examines with compassion and humor the lives of Indonesian migrant workers, easing the weight of reality with poetic transitions. These diverse themes, be it grand or modest, are captured through So’s shifting lens, rendered in different media and his fluid artistic language, each piece scratching an itch in the viewer’s consciousness.

Compared to his previous solo exhibitions, So’s latest show Drawing From Monday, comprised entirely of drawings, is much lighter in form and concept. The exhibition features nearly a hundred watercolor drawings, each on A4 size paper. Though small in scale, they embody the artist’s daily practice and disciplined routine, reflecting a state of urgency in which an illustrator finds themselves when racing against a deadline. The exhibition title, Drawing From Monday, instantiates the state of constant art making. “I set a rule for myself to draw at least one piece a day, as if every day were Monday. I just keep drawing, nonstop, every single day,” So explained. The original sketches for these drawings mostly came from So’s sketchbook, where they began as flashes of inspiration or storyboards for various projects. The catalyst for transferring these sketches onto paper as colorful drawings was a gift of several stacks of A4 size paper from a friend who runs a publishing and printing business.

I began killing time, drawing on these sheets of paper, without a specific agenda in mind. Sometimes I draw for the kids; other times, I draw for my wife. Family is the basis of these drawings. I don’t have a studio. The only time I leave the house is for film shooting. I write scripts or edit footage right there in the living room, keeping my family company while I work. There’s a deeper sense of familial bond in the act of drawing. There’s no need to run around. I can share with my kids whatever I’ve drawn, and they would start drawing, too. For my kids, what I do for a living becomes crystal clear because of drawing.

— So Yo Hen

Even though family life has become part of So’s creative process, these drawings do not explicitly reference the sense of family. Instead, each drawing is like a vignette with subtle, pointed humor. Witty and mordant, these drawings bring a smile to the face, yet lurk behind a thin veil of melancholy — warped by a sense of distance and solitude through the artist’s gaze. These wry, biting scenarios, limed by the tip of the artist’s brush, and rendered in watercolor on crisp white A4 size paper, while small in scale, unfold in visual authenticity.

For So, art making is as much personal as it is political, a space that allows for hefty investigation and airy levity. Drawing From Monday manifests itself in the artist’s defiance of constraints and self-indulgent exploration of the whimsical world on paper. Following the artist’s footsteps, the viewer — traversing Hua-shan-qiang, heeding the distant echo of Plaster Gong, listening in on stories that unravel in Taman-taman, and beholding the countless nights of bidding goodnight to his kids before delving into work — watches as So Yo Hen unfurls and coalesces into a kaleidoscope of changing faces.