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拍品专文
By the end of 1959, Hsiao Chin was living in Milan in close proximity to the birthplace of Greco-Roman and Renaissance art, having befriended a circle of European artists. His worldly outlook and travel experiences spurred him to reexamine his own cultural origins, and to look for common values across all cultures. Having sojourned in Europe for decades, he never forgot his mission of furthering East-West cultural communication. Untitled (Lot 10) interrogates the mysteries and spiritual being of the universe through art, and showcases the core essence of his oeuvre.
During the 1950s and 60s, Western artists were exploring new forms that extended beyond the Abstract Expressionist and Art Informel movements that had dominated earlier decades. Untitled contains strong beams of spear-like sunlight that dazzle the viewer and echoes the visual qualities of Op-Art, with its sharp lines and shapes that give definition to the visual experience. Untitled can be seen as a precursor to the artist’s 1970s works, which are often categorised as hard edge paintings due to their geometric shapes and clean colour-blocking. The painting contains crisp borders reminescent of Frank Stella’s stripe paintings. From a macro-perspective, all of these artistic movements leading towards Minimalism strove to create a path beyond Abstract Expressionism by delineating art with the bare minimum of visual elements and rational theory.
As one among thousands, Hsiao Chin consciously established an artistic language that let East and West coexist by taking up Western stylistic methods, while at the same time placing emphasis on a return to the "Eastern essense of intuition." Simply put, his creations are "pure intuition and not rational, perhaps even antirational". Here is where Hsiao’s works differ from minimalism: simplifying the complex is just a means to an end, the end being to cut straight into the heart of the viewer, and to allow them to ponder on the relationship between the universe and their own selves. In contrast with Minimalist artist Dan Flavin’s Untitled (Monument for V. Tatlin) , Hsiao Chin’s art doesn’t just challenge the relationship between the artwork and its spatial reality, but also bridges the visual world and the world of the mind.\
Hsiao Chin incorporates elements from a broad spectrum of Eastern sources, from Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, to mandalas and Zen thought, all of which nurtured his spiritual practice and gave him endless sources of creative inspiration. A series of artworks with solar depictions, which he begain painting since 1963, were inspired by Buddhist mandalas, which symbolise the organic and neverending cycles of natural phenomena. The basic structure of a mandala drawing consists of squares, circles, triangles, half-moon shapes, and droplets, representing earth, water, fire, wind, and air. Examining a thangka of the Hevajra mandala, the symbolic shapes are layered, staggered and infinite, training the viewer to sense destruction and rebirth of the self — the source of all spiritual power. Untitled is similarly made up of layers of brown-red and pale greybrown circles, and thin rings of mustard-yellow, with rays of cinnabar-red sunbeams that expand infinitely as though to consume everything ouside the canvas. The beams seem to funnel everything beyond the canvas into its focal point, the red circle: life and death pressed into one “dot”, its infinite power wielded with utter control by Hsiao Chin.
Untitled strikes a balance between the ambition to conquer the universe and the ephemeral nature of all things, transcending the viewer’s visual experience to reach a state of religious realisation. When we gaze into the source of this power, we cannot help but be astonished by the work of an artist who dedicated his life to the cultivation of his own art and self—a spiritual piece of Eastern art with Western aesthetic influences.
During the 1950s and 60s, Western artists were exploring new forms that extended beyond the Abstract Expressionist and Art Informel movements that had dominated earlier decades. Untitled contains strong beams of spear-like sunlight that dazzle the viewer and echoes the visual qualities of Op-Art, with its sharp lines and shapes that give definition to the visual experience. Untitled can be seen as a precursor to the artist’s 1970s works, which are often categorised as hard edge paintings due to their geometric shapes and clean colour-blocking. The painting contains crisp borders reminescent of Frank Stella’s stripe paintings. From a macro-perspective, all of these artistic movements leading towards Minimalism strove to create a path beyond Abstract Expressionism by delineating art with the bare minimum of visual elements and rational theory.
As one among thousands, Hsiao Chin consciously established an artistic language that let East and West coexist by taking up Western stylistic methods, while at the same time placing emphasis on a return to the "Eastern essense of intuition." Simply put, his creations are "pure intuition and not rational, perhaps even antirational". Here is where Hsiao’s works differ from minimalism: simplifying the complex is just a means to an end, the end being to cut straight into the heart of the viewer, and to allow them to ponder on the relationship between the universe and their own selves. In contrast with Minimalist artist Dan Flavin’s Untitled (Monument for V. Tatlin) , Hsiao Chin’s art doesn’t just challenge the relationship between the artwork and its spatial reality, but also bridges the visual world and the world of the mind.\
Hsiao Chin incorporates elements from a broad spectrum of Eastern sources, from Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, to mandalas and Zen thought, all of which nurtured his spiritual practice and gave him endless sources of creative inspiration. A series of artworks with solar depictions, which he begain painting since 1963, were inspired by Buddhist mandalas, which symbolise the organic and neverending cycles of natural phenomena. The basic structure of a mandala drawing consists of squares, circles, triangles, half-moon shapes, and droplets, representing earth, water, fire, wind, and air. Examining a thangka of the Hevajra mandala, the symbolic shapes are layered, staggered and infinite, training the viewer to sense destruction and rebirth of the self — the source of all spiritual power. Untitled is similarly made up of layers of brown-red and pale greybrown circles, and thin rings of mustard-yellow, with rays of cinnabar-red sunbeams that expand infinitely as though to consume everything ouside the canvas. The beams seem to funnel everything beyond the canvas into its focal point, the red circle: life and death pressed into one “dot”, its infinite power wielded with utter control by Hsiao Chin.
Untitled strikes a balance between the ambition to conquer the universe and the ephemeral nature of all things, transcending the viewer’s visual experience to reach a state of religious realisation. When we gaze into the source of this power, we cannot help but be astonished by the work of an artist who dedicated his life to the cultivation of his own art and self—a spiritual piece of Eastern art with Western aesthetic influences.