ART BASEL HONG KONG 2025 Chen Hsing-wan: DEVOTIONS

A solo showcase of the late Taiwanese mixed media pioneer Chen Hsing-wan, 'DEVOTIONS' presents a selection of ink paintings and mixed media pieces produced between the 1980s and 1990s that highlights Chen's rigorous material and formal experimentations as a rare woman artist in the male-dominated artistic landscape of late 20th century Taiwan. Anchored by a lifelong commitment to exploring how an aesthetic asceticism could be expressed through complex assemblages of textures and structures, Chen's practice, which was cut short by her untimely death in 2004, sought to excavate and manifest the innate spirituality of things, rooted in a rich visual vocabulary that works through abstraction in order to access the sublime.

In the groundbreaking 1986 exhibition ‘The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985,’ organised by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), a novel reading of the history of abstraction in modern painting and contemporary art places the historical western avant-garde at the confluence of mystic and occult practices. Stemming from a distrust of the muscular, universalist premise of Enlightenment rationality, artists sought to synthesise and identify the essences of the spiritual in complex geometries that allowed for the transcendental to be channeled through shapes, lines, and colours. Pioneer abstractionists such as Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian all experimented with clarified, pared-down visual vocabularies that decomposed reality into its constituent elements of pure form, and in their attempts, created new spiritual expressions.

Situated within the specific trajectories of these incursions into the sacral realm, the practice of the late Taiwanese artist Chen Hsing-wan is likewise preoccupied with a quest for the sublime in the mundane through, in her earlier period, the assemblage of common materials and textures, and, in her later years, the formal dynamism of ink on paper. Both a pioneer of mixed media art and a rare woman artist who rose to prominence within the male-dominated artistic landscape of late 20th century Taiwan, Chen's early works are marked by a sensitivity towards material surfaces and their combinatorial potentials, composing massive collages such as 'War and Peace No.1' (1995, Collection of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts) which combines and compresses acrylic-soaked hemp ropes, canvas, and linen into a large wall-bound piece that tackles the monumentality of sacrifice and suffering during wartime, drawing on her reflections of war-time reportage of the Nanking Massacre. Meanwhile, in later works such as 'Impressions of Germany: from Gorecki-Henryk's Symphony No.3' (1999, Collection of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts), a six-panel ink painting documents her emotive response to the eponymous musical piece by the Polish composer and evinces the sublimation of guilt and grief into divinity.

As the first solo fair showcase of Chen, who passed away in Paris after being diagnosed with breast cancer, 'DEVOTIONS' aims to chronicle her spiritual rigour and artistic journey through a selection of mixed media pieces and ink paintings from her two major artistic phases, produced between the 1980s and 1990s. Tracing the emergent sophistication of Chen's material language, from texture to movement, 'DEVOTIONS' highlights both her formal development of an ascetic aesthetics that confronts the inarticulable gestures and affects of human existence, such as emotions, and her experimentations with deconstructing the visual plane of traditional paintings. While widely recognized in her native Taiwan as the daughter of master sculptor Chen Hsia-yu and a disciple of abstract painting pioneer Li Chung-sheng, Chen's own legacy of innovation and struggles to identify the agency of materiality and thingness through mixed media abstractions is much less known, highlighting the continual erasure of women's voices in the writing of art histories.

Part of PTT Space’s ongoing initiative to excavate and re-centre the granular narratives of Taiwanese art history that go beyond present configurations of the canonical, 'DEVOTIONS' ultimately seeks to surface the quiet passions of Chen's spiritual studies — her devotions to art, to life, and to living — that reveal to us the divinity embedded in our everyday.