PAN HSIN-HUA

More resilient than the traditional Xuan paper, Pan Hsin-hua constructs his ink paintings on Hemp paper, which comes from Puli, an urban township in Taiwan’s Nantou County. The paper is treated with Alum, which gives it the earthy wash characteristic of an ancient map or mural. Adding water to opaque mineral pigments, he builds the different parts of his paintings layer by layer, avoiding too much build-up of ink so as to retain the paper’s texture. He carefully composes the work in mogu or ‘boneless’ style—a traditional compositional technique in which perspective is absent and forms seemingly float about the picture plane. Influenced by his childhood spent in Taiwan’s lush Taitung County, Pan Hsin-hua draws elements from the natural world such as dusty pastel moths, lotus leaves and flowers together with the occasional cherub-like child to form playful scenes.

Pan Hsin-hua’s work has been presented in a number of institutional shows both in Taiwan and around the world, including Vanish Landscape, a solo exhibition held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1999, and Landscape to Mindscape of Floating World: Contemporary Art from Taiwan, held in 2010 at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, and the Mitsuo Aida Museum in Tokyo. The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts also presented Pan Hsin-hua’s work in the group exhibition Memories Overlapped and Interwoven: Post-Martial Law Period Ink Painting in Taiwan in 2017. The exhibition shed light on the evolution of ink during the authoritative system of Martial Law and how the art has thrived since the lifting of Martial Law in 1987. Pan Hsin-hua’s work was also exhibited in Australia in the travelling exhibition INK REMIX: Contemporary art from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong (2015–17), which was exhibited at a number of venues including Canberra Museum and Gallery, and Museum of Brisbane. Pan Hsin-hua currently lives and works in Taipei and Hualien.

Tessa Moldan | Ocula | 2018