Over the course of his six-decade-long career, artist Hsu Tung-Lung (b. 1947, Pingtung) has steadily honed a rich gestural vocabulary of abstraction that runs through much of his painting and sculpting practice. Grounded in the rigorous study of motion and stillness, a duality inherent to both landscapes and bodies, Hsu’s practice identifies how movement, whether real or imagined, can serve as the locus of animacy that grants objects and surfaces their vibrance and vitality.

Acting as a portal that re-positions our relationship to the material world and the immaterial forces that shape it, Hsu’s works channel the infinite mutability of our collective memory to invite new readings of not just what things are, but how things can be—by doing so, he negotiates the activation of radical potentials embedded within matter to instigate dynamic encounters between the view and the viewer, the subject and the object.

Throughout the exhibition’s namesake series Memory of a Landscape, order and precision become apparent on closer examinations of what may first appear to be bounded fields of visual chaos. In some pieces, clusters of short strokes suggest silhouettes and evoke the phantasmal bodies of apparitions emerging from, or maybe entering, a primordial vortex; in others, jagged shards interlock in almost sacral studies of geometry. Broad brushstrokes occupy the canvas in large, swooping mesh-like forms, tracing the contours of intersecting planes with an almost calligraphic certainty, amongst a broad array of gestures and forms that populate Hsu’s dramatic compositions of rich, saturated colours that are intensely visceral and viscerally intense.

Titled in a running serial sequence that appears to mark instances of remembrance, works in this series evoke two seemingly disparate but actually mutually constitutive approaches: Chinese ink painting, and its rich traditions of virtuosic brushworks that sought to express the essence of its subject; and the Japanese Gutai movement, which sought to neither ‘alter’ nor ‘distort’ but ‘impart life’ to matter. In both cases, the core logic is evident—a commitment to capturing an intrinsic nature within, in the case of Chinese ink painting, the subject, and, in the case of Gutai, the media itself.

Echoing this sentiment in the pursuit of an elemental materiality, the sculpture series Kun works with an inverse logic to the same end. Utilising the techniques of reduction and deletion, Hsu demonstrates his expert craftsmanship in stone work, trained on decades of experience as a master jade carver, to excavate and release the spirit of marble in humanoid and ribbon-like forms that appear to defy some laws of physics—heroic profiles clad in delicately carved robes and undulating loops that seem to resist the pull of gravity with a remarkably serene dignity.

A timely introduction to the meticulous oeuvre of an understated Taiwanese modernist master, Hsu Tung-Lung: Memory of a Landscape contemplates and celebrates the material logics of art and its transcendental promises—not just for the audience but also the elemental matters that surround our collective psyche and culture.