“I returned to the brush, allowing pigments to speak where words and images once had.”
A Language Without Words
Emerging from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Hui-Hsuan Hsu has spent over two decades carving a thoughtful, nuanced path in the art world. Now based in Taichung, her work spans painting, photography, and video art, reflecting a career rich with inquiry into perception and imagination. Educated in the United Kingdom, Hsu earned a practice-led PhD in 2015 from the University of Leeds, where she focused her research on the relationship between digital media and artistic practice. In addition to her art-making, she spent nearly a decade as an assistant professor at Tunghai University, guiding students through the complexities of contemporary visual expression. Yet, 2025 marked a pivotal shift—Hsu chose to leave academia and devote herself entirely to painting, a medium that has become both her expressive outlet and her refuge.
Hsu’s transition from digital forms to the tactile act of painting reveals an evolving artistic philosophy rooted in emotional authenticity and embodied experience. Where video art and photography once allowed her to engage with the precision and structure of digital tools, she now finds painting to be a quiet ritual of safety and introspection. Unlike the controlled choreography of digital production, her process with oil and canvas unfolds without premeditation. Paint is laid down intuitively, forms emerge from repeated brushwork, and space takes shape through gradual layering. This absence of planning is not an absence of intention; instead, it is a form of trust—trust in memory, in feeling, and in the subconscious to guide the composition toward its final form.
Her titles serve as anchoring points, often poetic yet grounded in specific experiences. They function like narrative cues in a dream—hinting at storylines that may or may not unfold. In Hsu’s work, abstraction is never disconnected from life. Her paintings embody a quiet duality: simultaneously intimate and aloof, they stand as elusive companions to the viewer. These visual pieces whisper about encounters that shape us, moments remembered but not fully understood, and the lingering cultural residues that form beneath the surface of everyday perception. Rather than seeking to explain, her work invites the viewer into an ambiguous space where meaning remains beautifully unsettled.
Hui-Hsuan Hsu: When Memory Paints the Surface
The seeds of Hsu’s artistic journey were planted during a seemingly ordinary childhood outing that turned into something quietly transformative. At the age of eight, she watched Vincent and Me, a 1990 Canadian fantasy film about a young girl who time-travels to 19th-century France to meet Vincent van Gogh. The girl’s direct engagement with Van Gogh’s expressive brushstrokes left a lasting impression on Hsu, who, in her doctoral thesis years later, would reflect on this encounter as a formative moment. The film not only introduced her to the act of art-making but also embedded in her the idea that mediated experiences—cinema, in this case—can profoundly shape perception and creativity. This early moment signaled her lifelong curiosity about the boundary between direct experience and its representation through media.
Despite her growing passion, Hsu did not follow a linear path to becoming a full-time artist. For years, her practice existed alongside academic responsibilities, part-time work, and personal upheavals. The decision to transition fully into painting was not born from sudden inspiration but from sustained introspection, sharpened by life events between 2020 and 2021. During this period, she navigated a divorce, relocation, and the isolating rhythms of the COVID-19 lockdowns. These experiences cracked open a new space for emotional exploration—one that photography and video, with their technological mediation, could no longer contain. Instead, she turned to painting as a way to process unresolved emotions and reconnect with tactile immediacy.
Returning to painting during a time of personal and global uncertainty, Hsu discovered that abstraction offered her a space where language fell short. Working from home, often while mentoring painting students, she found that the medium allowed for a deeper conversation—one that wasn’t structured by theory or constrained by form. Her method became a form of dialogue between herself and the canvas, where pigments could articulate the inexpressible. It was less about depicting the world and more about listening to it through color, texture, and form. In abandoning the frame of photographic accuracy, she embraced ambiguity as a kind of truth—messy, unresolved, and deeply human.
Intuition, Abstraction, and the Echoes of the Familiar
Hsu’s abstract paintings are rich with emotional residue and subtle references. Rather than beginning with defined imagery, her process unfolds as a response to memory, fleeting impressions, and subconscious associations. Within each canvas lies a slow excavation of form, where personal history meets sensory intuition. Often, a familiar shape or mood will emerge—an echo from a photograph seen long ago, a color from a childhood memory, or even an image sourced from the pixelated landscapes of online video games. These fragments become the silent protagonists in her compositions, guiding her brush and shaping the emotional undercurrents of each work.
A quiet moment of recognition serves as the climax in Hsu’s process. After layering, revising, and reimagining the canvas, there comes a pause when something within the painting clicks into place—a sense of déjà vu that signals completion. This encounter with familiarity does not resolve into clear narrative but hovers just at the edge of understanding. In this way, her work resists didacticism and embraces openness, allowing viewers to bring their own memories and associations to the visual field. The painting becomes a mirror, not of physical likeness, but of emotional and mnemonic resonance.
The influence of artists such as Eva Hesse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edvard Munch, and Peter Doig can be felt in Hsu’s commitment to mood, organic structure, and the interior landscape. From Hesse, she draws an appreciation for repetition and gesture; from O’Keeffe, an understanding of abstraction as a means of intimacy. Munch’s emotional weight and Doig’s dreamlike atmospheres also echo in her pieces. Yet, Hsu’s work is unmistakably her own—quiet but intense, structured yet improvisational. The brush is not merely a tool, but an extension of emotional inquiry. Through each stroke, she offers viewers access to the liminal space between seeing and feeling, between memory and material.
Hui-Hsuan Hsu: Paintings That Speak in Shifts and Shadows
Among Hsu’s recent works, The Christmas Tree by the Sea (2024) holds particular significance. A square oil painting measuring 174 by 174 centimeters, it captures the contrast between festive symbolism and personal melancholy. The title references a specific winter memory in Brighton, England, where she once stood by a swaying Christmas tree on the pier, surrounded by joyful children and solemn adults. While the holiday setting might suggest warmth and celebration, Hsu felt a creeping disquiet—an awareness of uncertainty and isolation. That moment crystallized into a visual and emotional metaphor, now layered into the surface of the canvas. In its atmospheric tones and abstract forms, the piece echoes the emotional weight of Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, distilling solitude into visual form.
Another compelling work, Late Summer Seaside Trip: Watermelon, Coast and You (2022), began without sketches and evolved through improvisation. Initially horizontal, the painting shifted to a vertical format as Hsu followed instinct over plan. Subtropical heat may have informed the palette—muted blues and greens suggesting both summer’s heaviness and the cool isolation of a sun-bleached coast. A small red block near the bottom center, added late in the process, becomes a silent character in the piece: distant, indifferent, like a half-eaten watermelon abandoned on a beach. This object, seemingly simple, speaks volumes about the complexities of connection and absence, and the emotional residue that clings to seasonal rituals.
Her most recent piece, Cat TV (2025), offers a playful yet deeply reflective insight into the mechanics of her creative process. The painting emerged through a tactile, spontaneous engagement with materials—wet wipes used as makeshift brushes, spiral patterns formed through circular rubbing, and layers built through interruption and revision. Inspired by the back-and-forth relationship between cats and their favorite genre of YouTube entertainment, Hsu parallels her artistic engagement to that of a cat chasing movement on a screen. She is both the painter and the audience, simultaneously guiding the marks and being captivated by them. Living with two cats who often intrude on her work, she found herself blurring the lines between observation and participation, creator and responder. In naming the piece Cat TV, she wryly acknowledges the surreal feedback loop of her own studio practice—where art-making becomes both a game and a meditation, a chase and a discovery.
