Reef Hsu Taiwanese, b. 1987

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Biography
Reef Hsu is an experienced artist with an international reputation and award-winning pedigree. Reef Hsu, born in 1978 in Taiwan, graduated from Hsinchu University of Education with an  M.F.A, and was selected for the programme 'Made in Taiwan: Young Artist Discovery' by the Ministry of Culture in 2009. Reef Hsu was also awarded the Nan Ying Award in 2020. His fascinating body of work ranges from densely-packed and meticulous drawings to intense and atmospheric oil paintings.

His practice divides into two areas of practice: the figurative and the abstract. The drawings are graphic depictions of natural forms and animals, juxtaposed in tightly-wrought and crowded compositions. Hsu's paintings are schemas of diffuse pastel, colour articulated by a subtly-textured paint film.

 

The studies of nature's super-abundance, teeming with detailed descriptions of a multitude of plants and animals, express a fecund world of variety and growth. Lizards, monkeys, sloths and even elephants peer out from hidden places in a packed landscape of plants and flowers. The drawing is forensic and controlled. Literal in its description, it suggests the specific recordings of Victorian botanical enquiry. This level of intensity channels the hallucinatory flavour of Richard Dadd's fairy-tale pictures.

 

In their obsessive complexity these busy images anticipate the formal abstractions of the paintings. In these, Hsu deploys painstaking accumulations of uniform, cellular, grain-shaped marks that combine to make a softly-textured, modulated surface. Carefully-rendered colour articulates the shifting forms and masses of the compositions, prompting comparisons with the aesthetics of classical landscape painting, as they swirl and bloom across the indeterminate space of the picture plane.

 

Ambiguous in scale, they are evocative of many possible subjects: landscape, clouds, bacteria, interstellar plasma, magnified skin, a forest seen from space. Are they big or little things? Whatever they are reminiscent of, or refer to, they speak of something elemental and generative, that is both macro and micro, and, like the drawings, contains the processes essential to life.

Works
  • Untitled 無題 16
    Untitled 無題 16, 2021
    Oil on canvas
    116.5 x 80 cm
    45.87 x 31.5 in
  • Moonlight 月光下-2
    Moonlight 月光下-2, 2020
    Pencil on paper
    82.5 x 94.2 cm
    32.48 x 37.09 in
  • Untitled 無題 10
    Untitled 無題 10, 2020
    Oil on canvas
    162 x 130 cm
    63.8 x 51.2 in
  • Untitled 無題 15
    Untitled 無題 15, 2020
    Oil on canvas
    130 x 192cm
    51.2 x 75.6 in
  • Untitled 無題 8
    Untitled 無題 8, 2020
    Oil on canvas
    91 x 72.5 cm
    35.9 x 28.5 in
  • Root 根
    Root 根, 2015
    Pencil on paper
    82.5 x 85 cm
    32.48 x 33.46in
  • My Brain 我的大腦-3
    My Brain 我的大腦-3, 2014
    Pencil on paper
    82.5 x 62.3 cm
    32.48 x 24.53 in
  • Symbiosis 共生-2
    Symbiosis 共生-2, 2014
    Pencil on paper
    79cm (diameter)
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Exhibitions