PAN Hsin-Hua: Tread from the Hinterland

Tread from the Hinterland

2023.February.11 — March.12

Text｜Daniel CHOU

Real or ethereal, one might wonder, in front of the mottled canvas—beggarticks’ blossoms springing out from Taihu rocks and rebars; butterflies roaming teemingly beside a tortoise-fish; a partially nude child seated formally within concrete side slopes… At Hiro Hiro Art Space, Pan Hsin-Hua Solo Exhibition—Tread from the Hinterland—transcends time and transverses reality and phantasy, inviting the viewer’s mind to toy with the images and paintings to conjure one after one mystifying, numinous, and intriguing wonderlands.

PAN Hsin-Hua / Spring outing / 2023 / ink and colors on paper / 51 x 170 cm

Traditional ink-and-wash is appreciated for its imagery, but presenting a distant view of landscape and figures sometimes distances the viewer from the painting, creating a sense of alienation. In “Spring outing,” PAN Hsin-Hua breaks the conventions and alienated feeling of literati ink-and-wash, and for the first time, he brings the figure closer to a close-up above the chest, with a 45-degree angle side face facing out of the painting.

Tread from the Hinterland is a creative practice of the artist’s foray into the forest wilderness. PAN Hsin-Hua’s birthplace and hometown—Taimali, in Taitung—cultivated his predilection for fishing, river-trekking, and his periodic revisits to the secluded mountain there to seek inspiration from the nature and surroundings, still so after his thirty-year endeavor into art. The paintings at this exhibition are no exceptions: vine-like rebar entangled in concrete blocks, claw-shaped tree roots intertwining building wreckages, running rivers hustling through derelict factories, and rusty vessel compartments stranded ashore as boats beached on land, et cetera. These seemingly surreal scenes under his brush are all “reconstructed realities” based on his own observation.

PAN Hsin-Hua / Just like the center of the water / 2022 / ink and colors on paper / 112 x 177 cm

In “Just like the center of the water,” the dense forest and scattered Taihu Lake rocks are arranged in an orderly manner. The child in the middle of the painting appears to be naughty and playfully bare his lower body, but looks intently at the viewer outside the painting. Intuitively, the child is somewhat inconsistent with the landscape behind him. However, the ambiguous relationship between the landscape, figures and viewers defies the one-direction viewing and detached feeling of the literati’s ink-and-wash.

The further into the hinterland, the braver one needs to tread alone. Specialized in ink-and-wash painting in undergraduate study, yet untrammeled by the Chinese literati style, which accentuates expressive brushstrokes and lofty imagery, PAN Hsin-Hua’ embraced meticulous painting, allowing a broader range of real-life subjects. Before painting, he first altered the texture of papers by selectively applying alum and dyeing colors; he then deployed a boneless technique in lieu of the outline for coloring. Moreover, drawing on the layout of earlier paintings and ancient maps, he develops a two-dimensional style—devoid of light-and-shadow and field depth, filled with multiple color gamuts, and metamorphosing the shape and nature of its subjects—landscapes, outlandish flowers, exotic monsters, juveniles, buildings, et cetera—each of which was juxtaposed. A phantasy anachronistically and yet harmonious is born, ravishing and entrancing, as if to invite all of us to venture into this mystery.

PAN Hsin-Hua / Autumn outing / 2023 / ink and colors on paper / 73 x 80 cm

The work “Autumn outing” marks PAN Hsin-Hua’s new attempt at painting techniques. The hiker with a walking stick is the artist himself, and has appeared in earlier paintings, but the freer botanical form than the past works reflects PAN’s inner desire for the sincerity, simplicity, and unrestrainedness of paintings.

Treads after treads, the hinterland gradually became the representation of the passage of PAN Hsin-Hua’s life. Roving in the East Rift Valley, between the Central Mountain Range and the Coastal Mountain Range, the vicissitudes of his life seemed to mirror the terrain and its ups and downs—he began with ink but refused to end with ink. As an iconoclast, he incessantly continues innovating as if to tread the tortuous trail between the West and ancient China and modernity and tradition. He trailblazed a path of his own, plodding through the inescapable arduous road in this hidden valley. Let us follow his treads. Venture and then return—set oneself free from the shackle of traditions and reality, traveling through the natural canyon and the creative hinterland. Within one’s perception and sense, traditions and modernity, ancient China and the West, and truth and phantasy—all dichotomies are to dissolve, and, eventually, one returns to the utopia of free creation and sensibilities.

About PAN Hsin-Hua

Born in 1966 in Taitung, Taiwan, PAN Hsin-Hua graduated with B.A from the Department of Fine Arts at National Taipei University of the Arts in 1991.

His featured solo exhibitions include “Vanished Landscape” (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 1999), “Pan Hsin-hua solo Exhibition” (Michael Goedhuis, New York, 2009). His featured group exhibitions include “The New Aspect – 2009 Exhibition of Contemporary Cross–Strait Ink Paintings” (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, 2009), “Landscape to Mindscape of Floating World – Contemporary Art from Taiwan” ( National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan / Mitsuo Aida Museum, Tokyo, 2010), “Ink: The Art of China” (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2012), “Check-in: Traveling with the Artist” (Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art, Kaohsiung, 2013), “Ink Remix: Contemporary art from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong” (Canberra Museum and Gallery Canberra / University of New South Wales Sydney / Bendigo Art Gallery Bendigo / Museum of Brisbane, 2015), “Crisscrossing East and West: The Remarking of Ink Art in Contemporary East Asia”(MOCA Yinchuan, China, 2017), “Memories Interwoven and Overlapped post – Martial Law Era Ink Painting in Taiwan” (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, 2017), “Subzoology: 2020 Taiwan Biennial” ( National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, 2020), “Era of principle and no principle interwoven: Calligraphy as a Visual Form” (Hengshan Calligraphy Art Center, Taoyuan, 2023).

His works are collected in Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, and Guandu Museum of Fine Arts.

Works