After Dawn, Till Moonrise-Aihua HSIA solo exhibition
Messenger’s Spokesperson
By LAI Yun-hsin
Associate Professor at the Department of Sculpture, NATIONAL TAIWAN UNIVERSITY OF ARTS
The exhibition theme “After Dawn, Till Moonrise” of Hsia, Ai-Hua is an extraordinary experience that she wanted to present in the gray area of time flows. Like during the chaotic moment from day to night or certain time or place, she could be more insightful to the skyline, thereby she can feel things that others can’t. Most people can only see things and people in our dimension, but some people sometimes could see things from other dimensions. And she is the person who can meet the messengers (or fairies) to bring her messages at some uncertain time flows.
Hsia, Ai-Hua graduated from the Department of Sculpture in National Taiwan University of Arts and studied for sculpture art in Japan. However, she is never restrained by general sculpture material and presentation. Her educational background has been the nutrition of her creation, which seems natural and spontaneous, but there are solid academic roots behind.
Raw lacquer is a general material that has been used for art pieces for a long time. Compare to the dark and solemn tone, there are some art pieces created by using raw lacquer are vivid and light. Her art pieces have vivid forms and fresh colors, which are rare characteristics. The technique of “hollow dry lacquer” she learned in Japanese is actually originated from the method of “dry lacquer” in China, which was mature technique to make Buddha statues in ancient China. Although the statues painted by dry lacquer can be preserved for many years, it was costly to obtain raw lacquer because of the complicated and time-consuming production procedures. Even though with the advantage of poison-free, the technique was soon be replaced by the FRP technique with the features of fast and cheap. The time-consuming procedures could be necessary for her to digest the messages brought by messenger through complicated creation procedures in a restricted working environment that requires certain humid and falling dust.
Once in the opening ceremony of her solo exhibition, she talked about the experience that she was surprised by a red toad jumping from dead trees when she took a walk nearby a hotel in Kamikochi, Japan. She was expressed by the scene and thought it was a rare moment to get the creation idea. This reminded me of the Japanese wood sculpture master, Ikki Miyake, who told me he dreamed about god’s message on other day that brought him to pick up dry trunk in the backyard of a temple for art creation. He maintained most part of the dry trunk and carved out the image of Buddha in certain area. Compared to the ascetic practice and serious creation attitude of Ikka, Hsia is like a poet that has seen through the world that she used the experience with the messengers with some playfulness, humor, and understanding to create a series of art pieces, indicating to the world that “it should be more than this, there should be things that are more important!”
“Stick to your dream like a moth flying into fire” is her reply when she was interviewed about her creation attitude. She never talked about the hardship of creation and her life. She believes it is absolutely for her to become an artist. By choosing the technique of hollow dry lacquer, she followed the traditional way to choose materials and material vocabulary. Like ramie used to produce the Buddha statues of hollow dry lacquer is a symbol of worries, the exposition of the three-dimensional art pieces in her solo exhibition is to present the mental emotions while the red gunny is a transformed presentation of bustling red dust in the exposition of the two-dimensional ones.