text by Hsiao Chong-Ray
The birth of abstract painting is humans’ most major artistic achievements in the Twentieth Century. It escapes the figurative imitation of Nature, transcends the scenario description in literature or religion, and returns to the absolute structure of shape and color to reflect the inner truth. Abstract painting thus allows us more freedom to explore the profundity of art-making.
Ava Pao-shia Hsueh went to New York to study at Pratt Institute in 1983, which was almost one hundred years after the birth of abstract art (around 1910). Her advisor Richer Bove often asked her a question: “Ava, abstract art has developed for almost one hundred years, what do you think about the future of it, especially painting?” The question later became the ultimate pursuit of Hsueh’s artistic exploration.
The early abstract painting can be divided into Cold Abstract and Hot Abstract. The former features cool and rational geometric shape, while the latter features unrestrained and expressive strokes. However, one thing in common between these two mainstreams is how they break away from the imitation of Nature and the description of event. Instead, through “unrecognizable forms,” as how Wassily Kandinsky puts it, they attempt to explore and construct a “plastic world” of the most absolute elements in painting such as shape, color, and space.
As a young artist from the East, thanks to her cultural background, Hsueh is well familiar with the art forms in which the concept of absolute shape is integrated with signifiers, including calligraphy, xieyi ink painting (ink painting in expressive style), or the decoration patterns on ritual bronzes. Therefore, “does abstract painting have to shut off its connection with reality?” became the subject of Hsueh’s doctoral dissertation when she was studying at New York University as well as the focus of her later artistic practice. It was in Trace Series of the late 1980s that she started adopting numerous object symbols or texts with symbolic or narrative references. These imageries which seemed to “refer to something” or “base on something” perfectly demonstrated Hsueh’s intention to cross the contradictory and complex boundary/conflict between the figurative and the abstract, the absolute and the narrative, the conscious and the subconscious, as well as the manipulable and the un-manipulable.
After the 1990s, she started placing real objects (such as plastic fishing lure, fishing net, and fishing sinkers) in the images, further challenging the “absolute pureness” of abstract painting. Meanwhile, the symbolic objects revealed Hsueh’s high sensitivity to social issues, especially her critical and introspective speculation on human society as well as the essences, relations, and crises about Nature and the Universe.
Since the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, Hsueh had explored a new sphere of abstract art as she was busy in her art administration work. She juxtaposed the polysemous code in the image to discuss the intertextuality among different visual elements and to search for a new possibility for abstract art. “When we are trying to know about contemporary abstract art, we do not have to return to the conventional patterns to discuss abstract art like what we did in the beginning of the Twentieth Century; instead, we can make ourselves a bridge to connect the free creative imagination and the reality we are based on – it should be the way how we experience, perceive, and read these works,” says Hsueh.
In this series, Hsueh usually puts the images together as diptych, bringing the cold abstract of rationality and the hot abstract of dynamic linearity in co-existence to create a visual and psychological effect of mutual influences. She even places wood blocks on plywood in geometric shapes beyond the canvas.
In 2009, Hsueh finally ended her administrative career and survived the biggest challenge of her life. Walking through the valley of the shadow of death, she continued her exploration of the Flowing Reality. It was a conversation, a struggle, and a combination between “hot abstract,” with a bit of expressionism, and “cold abstract,” with nine flat painted dots. The exhibition Energetic Scene in 2012 was the extension of the series.
Waving goodbye to the self, to the concern for society and Nature, and to the dialectics between the abstract and the figurative, Hsueh returned to the essence of abstract art to “explore the self-exploration,” as described in epistemology it. She brought up the first substantial hypothesis: if abstract painting has become “figurative” throughout the historical process because of certain fixed understanding, how should abstract painting be creatively constructed as “contemporary abstract” in a “figurative process” like this? In other words, if a painting is easily known and identified as an “abstract painting,” abstract art also becomes self-referential. With the passing of time, its self-reference has paradoxically betrayed its nature. The “self-knowledge” thus allows Hsueh to explore a greater possibilities of contemporary abstract art to “construct one’s history through oneself” on the basis of its paradoxical quality.
In her recent works in the 2014, she returns to the simple and plain monochrome. It represents the Eastern aesthetics and reexamines one’s own culture. Hsueh has spent much time on learning calligraphy, printmaking, and even sculpture. She loves sport, and she thinks of it as a physical challenge of her own body. In her recent works, we see the training and the practice she has been working on transforming into the dynamics and elements in her paintings. When she stands in front of the vertical large-size painting to brandish the brush, especially the masterpiece Profound Realm(2014), she lets us see surfers riding the waves in the wind as well as Ariel the beautiful mermaid, and she invites us to dive into the deep blue – the immense, mysterious, and wonderful place in the bottom of one’s heart.
Hsueh says:
I prefer to start from the unknown during the process of artistic creation. But bridging the distance between the known and unknown in the creative process is akin to finding oneself in a mental space spun out of the complex relationships of thought and feeling. It is rather like gazing upon a map and constantly reconciling cognition and reality. However, this process gives me a fluidity of thought, which in turn gives rise to the momentum that is essential to making art.
She goes on speaking of that:
Over the course of the creative process, interlace thoughts come into existence at the moment the gaze is fixed. As they give rise to bodily form, a series of mind maps emerge.
“Mind (sim-siek)” in old Holo language has a more profound meaning than “pleasure” – “when your mind gets the meaning of something, pleasure emerges.” Hsueh’s “mind maps” are her adventurous cruise, and also the best navigation to share her “mind” with viewers.
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