Weathering - SHIU Sheng-Hung Solo Exhibition

With its origins in geology, the term ‘sediment’ indicates a material’s development over time, from which information can be extracted about an environmental state and its biological activity at a particular moment. This word, richly connoting dynamic growth, reminds the artist of what his paintings and the process of their creation evoke for him: “Through the layering of pigments, the chemical reactions between accumulated substances, and the surfaces shaped by the body and mind’s engagement with the material, clues about the creative process can be gleaned.” 

This solo exhibition by SHIU Sheng-hung presents recent works that demonstrate the artist’s unique imagination about time, material, and color, in response to his everyday life. In a daily practice of building the layers in his paintings, SHIU creates his color palette by mixing pigments and mediums by hand, then puts brush to canvas, proceeding through repetition, fine-tuning, and his perception. Here, painting enacts a kind of geological process, which also echoes the artist’s recent color explorations in natural mineral pigments, synthetic pigments, and other materials.

Continuing in the same creative vein of his artworks in the exhibition “Glacial” in 2021, SHIU Sheng-hung consciously chooses to use natural mineral pigments due to their lower toxicity to the human body. He also pays scrupulous attention to changes in the pigments on his brush, noting the effects of the environment and time over their transformation from ores to pigments. Through the appearance of each piece of ore —its morphology — he is able to trace it back to the environment in which it formed and was mined. In this way, the artist delineates the changing, entangled relationship of color pigments with scientific and technological evolution, industrial developments, and even geopolitics, throughout the history of human civilization. In different historical contexts and natural environments, these pigments — ancient red ochre, lapis lazuli, cobalt blue, yttrium indium manganese blue (YInMn Blue) — have appeared in heterogeneous states and materialities. By juxtaposing natural mineral pigments with artificial synthetic counterparts, SHIU Sheng-hung allows each ingredient of color to coexist and drift between the layers, shallow yet profound, in his paintings.

Painting, after all, is the accumulation of time and matter — akin to the beginning of all natural substances, where the amassing of particles simultaneously undergoes all kinds of constant change. The English title of the exhibition “Weathering” and its Mandarin Chinese title that implies “sedimentation” are cyclical and mutually complementary concepts, inviting the audience to reflect on these subtle and slow material processes, almost imperceivable yet constantly in flux. In SHIU Sheng-hung’s paintings, figurative and abstract associations merge and morph unceasingly, creating multiple dimensions of time and perspective in the artworks. Through the language and process of painting, each color and its particular characteristics gain significance — regarding how, via these materials, the world’s complex operations may be viewed, as well as how the artist’s works are able to hold a mirror to the artist’s own life.