SOB O CEU ESTRELADO / UNDER THE STARRY SKY

With Hsuan Lin Yi

On view at Projeto Fidalga, 299 rua Fidalga, São Paulo, Brazil, from December 14th until December 21st 2019 - part of the Curitiba Biennial 2019

Under the Starry Sky can be seen as the travel diary of the Taiwanese artist Lin Yi Hsuan, translating in the visual realm the strangeness and the impressions of his successive journeys between Asia and Latin America, in particular his come back to Brazil after some years abroad.

In the drawings exhibited, abstract characters that compose Hsuan’s personal mythology depict his experiences in Brazil, revealing in a kind of closeup, the basis of his pictorial vocabulary. In it, human forms, animals and objects are reduced to their purest expression, through curved or straight lines and colored areas; while the support serves as a field for color and texture experimentation next developed in the artist’s paintings.

In the paintings, figuration disappears, slipping from the daily life’s details to a broader vision, leaving room to composition and the use of color. Even so, organized or savage landscapes seem to emerge from the paint’s stripes and volutes, while the empty spaces and the absence of gravity reveal the influence of oriental arts or of the freedom that reigns in children’s drawings. The nuances, the textures of the brush strokes or sprayed paint complete the abstract imagery proposed by the artist, suggesting in a subtle manner the variations of the tropical light, the colors of the streets, the nuances of the vegetation or of the small things and more generally of the exotic characteristics that provoke the enchantment of the foreign traveler.

Maybe these drawings and paintings, using a universal language can explain better that any rational discourse the choice of Lin Yi Hsuan to live in Brazil: the luminous tones, soft or gritty, the organization and the exuberant chaos of his compositions being more able to sum up the attraction that transforms, despite anything, nomads of the world into Brazil’s inhabitants and the impression that this experience leaves in the retina and the flesh of whom ventures out this side of the ocean.

Mixing references from the East and the West, between abstraction and figuration, Hsuan translates the subjective experience of his life as a nomad, as an outsider, as an onlooker and as an artist. Endlessly creating and recreating images selected from his daily life to express thoughts that lie beyond spoken language, painting and drawing out his inner world and intimate thoughts, Lin Yi Hsuan’s hands make the invisible visible. Loneliness, longing, sheer terror, wonderment facing exotic and faraway places and the endless quest of what it means to be an artist in an absurd world dominated by greed and immediate satisfaction permeates the artist’s research. Under the starry sky, his first exhibition since his recent return to Brazil, proposes a subjective reading of how he feels to be back in the country he elected as his home.

LIN YI HSUAN

1985 born in Yi-lan , Taiwan, lives and works in Sao Paulo, Brazil. His artistic research mixes references of his travel and life experiences between Latin America and Asia through abstract figurative drawings and paintings in which he creates a subjective, hybrid mythological repertory.

Hsuan graduated in 2007 with a BFA from the Taipei National University of the Arts.

Among his individual shows are “We are turtles”, Kuandu museum of Fine Arts (Taipei, Taiwan 2019);  “STRAW”, EACH MODERN (Taipei, Taiwan, 2018); “Baby Danger Baby Estrano”, BASIN (Philadelphia, USA, 2017);  “A chicken and a dog, they walk”, JEFFREY STARK (New York, USA, 2016) and “SEE YA IN A BIT”, LOGO Gallery (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2013).

He also participated in group shows such as “Out of summer”, Simon Lee (Hong Kong, 2019); “Li Yuan-chia and Homages To”, EACH MODERN (Taipei, Taiwan, 2019);  “Poetic Gaze: Yilan Art Museum Collection Exhibition”, Yilan Art Museum (Yilan, Taiwan, 2017);  “Paper in practice”, Moran Bondaroff (Los Angeles, USA, 2016);  “Size of Life: Contemporary Writing and Painting”, Double Square, (Taipei, Taiwan, 2016);  “That’s the neighbor, always dressing these boulders in the yard”, Suzanne Geiss (New York, USA, 2014) and “Olhar e escolher”, Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2013) which also owns some of the artist’s artworks.

Lin Yi Hsuan was selected for the 2007 OUTPUT Award, the 2007 Taipei Arts Award and won the 2006 Ben Q Creation Gold Award. He has been resident at ISCP (New York, USA, 2019) and 18 Street Arts Center (Los Angeles, USA, 2013)