A Microcosms with Fluidity and Transparency: Hung Te-Chung’s Universe of Paintings
Written by Chen Kuang-Yi, Professor at Department of Art, National Taiwan University of Arts
Translated by RYE LIN ART & TRANSLATION
Hung Te-Chung is usually considered a skilful watercolour artist, and he also won countless awards. Aside from his widely-appraised extraordinary painting skills, his interest towards nature is also fully revealed in many of his works – water, stones, flowers are the elements he favours the most. Nevertheless, his water is more like the well-depicted vapour and aqua tones deriving from the proper mixture of pigment and water, rather than magnificent giant rivers or the ocean. His stones are more like naturally-rounded circles rich in colours and fully covered by mosses, instead of strange rocks that stand upright. His flowers are sometimes clear like crystals, thin like papers, fragile like bubbles, and the hazy petals diminish in the blurry background; and sometimes, they are gorgeously saturated, elegantly presented, spinning, hovering, flying and dancing like skirts before the monotonous backgrounds. Therefore, if we consider Hung Te-Chung an artist who simply wants to portray the scenery or present the lovely flowers, we might underestimate his ambition towards creation.
Hung Te-Chung favours traditional painting mediums – oil and watercolour – not for nostalgia or antiquarianism, nor does he lack modern knowledge; instead, it is because of his preference for warm and handmade characteristics when it comes to the practice of art. His preference shows the trace of craftsmanship, the insistence on the choice of mediums, and the madness for specific material characteristics. Personally, rather than saying that he likes and excels at watercolour, I will put that as he likes and excels at creating “fluidity” (fluidité). This illustrates how his works stay in between “forms” and “non-form” and why his oil paintings are not gluey and stagnant at all – they appear to be more like watercolour than oil. By pouring, splashing, dying, blurring, dotting, brushing, and whitening, Hung allows the pigments, absorbing rich amount of water or other solvents, to freely flow on white papers or canvases like torrents rushing into tunnels. In this process, we can see that the overwhelming emotions interlace with the meticulous arrangement which relies on reason and calmness. Now, if the wild elements in the Movement series are only confined by the boundary of the mediums, like a corner cut off from the Cosmos, then the Origin of Me series can be considered as a lump gathering together and resembling the birth of the Cosmos. As for the Transparency and Reflection series which features flowers, Hung’s use of light and elegant colours as well as the thin layers of pigment sophisticatedly blend in with the petals’ colour scheme and texture.
In the Form series, the latest series created in 2019, Hung began to explore the potentialities of acrylic paints: His clever use of saturated ink and pigmented colours changes the qualities of flowers. The marks left by the brushes and the thickness delivered by the materials speak just the opposite of the airy and lightweight characters of flowers; however, as the pigments absorb rich amount of water, the presentation is not a complete betrayal of flowers’ lightweight character. The texture and strokes created by acrylic paints imply speed and dynamics, and they make the petals seem like skirts flying around dancers’ waists. In terms of Hung’s research on mediums, he is bold enough to produce his own paints by using pigments, charcoal powder and glue so as to create a unique effect. The most eye-catching pieces are a series of close-up portraits of Chinese hibiscus, which seem to be painted by charcoal sticks. The exquisite depiction of Chinese hibiscus features clearly-defined forms and contrasting light and darkness. No solid lines drew by charcoal sticks can be actually seen even when one gets closer; instead, the colour panels are soft and blurry with a sense of fluidity. They fall down through the petals and spill over the petals’ edge, giving people an unspeakable, dream-like feeling.
Moreover, he creates perfect rendition of the medium’s “transparency” and “coverage” in his works. With patterns, textures, strokes, shapes, ink, dots, pigments, charcoal powder, and glue blending together and confronting each other, and layers of translucent and opaque pigments topping up to form a dimension of mystery, Hung’s works are more like complex organisms that continue to enlarge and shrink, or some unknown and different dimensions that are blurry – like the newly-born world created by Pangu – than just being water, stones, and flowers. These paintings are not totally abstract because the artist always manages to conclude his works with some figurative elements, or some forms that delivering concreteness. Perhaps we can call the style “biomorphism”, which imitates the concrete subjects through abstract elements and thus makes connection between the forms and the animals, plants, minerals, and human bodies. His works seem like microorganisms under abstract expressionist Wols’ microscope, or Jean Fautrier’s Hostage series painted after WWII, which applied thick layers of oil to symbolise the human flesh (chair).
In fact, referring to Hung’s own words, the Origin of Me represents “the ego of me” – even though it’s still solid and tough at the inside, its form is refined, and it turns to be gentle at the outside. As for the Movement series, it suggests that even though one’s ego is eradicated in the environment, the most essential and gentle part of oneself stays around. At the same time, flowers also imply his “own identity”. According to Hung, “Flowers are prevalent in nature but still widely loved. I use them to represent myself.” To make plants and minerals correspond to humans is similar to the concept of “microcosm” of the ancient Greek philosophy. The word “microcosm” was coined by the Greek philosopher Democritus, who considered that the cosmos was composed of atoms and “empty space”. In the 2nd century, doctor Galen also said that the ancient men, who mastered nature, reckoned living persons were like microcosms. (« Des Anciens versés dans l'étude de la nature disent que le vivant est comme un microcosme. ») The 20th century French philosopher Pierre A. Riffard also gave microcosm a definition in the Dictionary of Esotericism (Dictionnaire de l’ ésotérisme). He considered humans the epitome and summary of the sublime world; therefore, humans could build a word-to-word correspondence to link the two. (« l'homme en tant que résumé, synthèse et splendeur du monde avec lequel on peut établir des correspondances terme à terme ») Now, why humans are the epitome of the sublime world? It is not merely because humans are composed of the four elements – wind, fire, earth, and water – but also because humans possess all the qualities of the universe. Plato considered human souls the soul of the world, which drive both body movement and our consciousness, and possess both lives and spirits. Human bodies were also involved in Plato’s simile. For instance, “…the blood-particles, again, being minced up within us and surrounded by the structure of each creature as by a Heaven, are compelled to copy the motion of the whole.” 1 In Hung Te-Chung’s work, do the purposefully-enlarged stones, water, and flowers, which follow the object-oriented compositional method, correspond to not only the artist himself but also the cosmos and nature? Is mystery Hung’s pursuit, so he tries to portray the correspondence between spirits and objects, souls and bodies, reason and feeling, and then heaven and earth? Does Hung aim to invite viewers “to see a world in a grain of sand / and a heaven in a wild flower” like William Blake, in the artist’s not-too-large-in-size painting series? Or does he turn to the Oriental philosophy that campaigns the ongoing pursuit of “an essential and gentle version of oneself” to get rid of instabilities in the mundane world?
Whatever answers are to these questions, it is evident that Hung presents us something beyond beauty and skills – a potential path leading to the spiritual world. For viewers standing in front of his works, it’s not only visually sensational and astonishing but also spiritually sentimental.
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Plato, “81a,” in Timaeus, trans. W.R.M. Lamb.