Brook Hsu’s paintings are living and breathing, fueled by a commitment to her visual language. Comfort and illness reside in verdant shades, amplifying the artist’s role as practitioner of care and synthesizer of personal experience. 

Hsu insists that formlessness takes its own shape, resulting in an unbridled swell of abstract and figurative forms. Skeletons, girls and hares – expressions of animation within and beyond the mortal realm – emerge alongside efforts to maintain painting’s viability. Loops and lines commingle in sensuous fields of green and blue. Iron oxide enters as a violent sabotage, disrupting the more pensive hues while also providing complement to them: red as love and anger, green as tranquility and nature: It’s an unholy matrimony of opposites. Hsu just can’t seem to find her way out of green. Conceptual double binds execute the same tempestuous dance in her practice: love and death, violence and desire, bittersweetness. She reconciles differences by encouraging communion. 

Tragedy strikes and so does the brush. The content of Hsu’s work is generated in service of satisfying a painful event by transmuting it into something else. In the act of painting, rehearsals and demonstrations of love are fostered by affection and time invested. Koether’s maxim provides a competitive dimension, “Can desire be reinvented with and in painting? Slowly against the tide?” (Hsu has transcribed part of this lecture on fluorescent orange paper, which is on view in the gallery). The crisis of love and desire cannot be understated – nurture sustains the former while lack prompts the latter. This becomes a paradox that Hsu is tasked with working through. Desire proliferates as she paints, mirroring that of a lover who seeks an embrace from the Other. Consequently, an erotic tether is inscribed within the compositions – they become loving objects.

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai