Featured image: Twin Rivers, Peter Hsu, 2022, ink and gouache on canvas, 154 x 222 cm. / 60.6 x 48 in.
In his recent body of work, Peter Hsu continues to push the limits of mark-making, materiality, and memory through monumental installations, ephemeral silk forms, and intricate line drawings.
Peter Hsu explores cultural memory, diaspora, and abstraction through ink-based installations, calligraphic gestures, and evolving surface interventions.
With deep roots in diasporic identity and a visceral engagement with surface, Hsu’s practice meditates on what can be known and what escapes capture. Across scales and substrates, each work becomes a living terrain, revealing tensions between the abstract and autobiographical, the permanent and the perishable.
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I Don't Remember What I Saw When I Drowned/Slanted I Sight, Peter Hsu, 2024, mixed media, 300 x 960 x 4 cm. / 118.1 x 377.9 x 1.5 in.
The sprawling wall piece I Don't Remember What I Saw When I Drowned/Slanted I Sight stretches nearly ten meters across, enveloping the viewer in a matte-black cosmos. Ink, acrylic, and gesso create a shifting skin across MDF panels, with brushstrokes and scrawls emerging and dissolving in the dark surface. Modular in structure and fragmented in gesture, the work reflects both the dislocation of memory and the slanted perception of diasporic visibility, where clarity and erasure coexist in the same visual field.
Cloud Somersault, Peter Hsu, 2022, ink on silk, 117 x 2000 cm. / 46 x 787 in.
Suspended like a celestial map unraveling in motion, Cloud Somersault transforms the gallery with a sinuous, soaring river of ink on silk. The sheer scale, over twenty meters long, contrasts with the delicacy of the brushwork, which channels traditional calligraphic gestures into explosive abstraction. The piece twists through space like a meditative breath or a dream unspooling midair, blurring distinctions between language and landscape, gesture and gravity.
Waishengren/Benshengren, Peter Hsu, 2023, ink on paper, 42 x 29.7 cm. / 16.5 x 11.6 in.
In Waishengren/Benshengren, Hsu pares his language down to its most essential marks: fine ink lines rippling across a white field. This drawing, though modest in scale, quietly encapsulates the underlying dualities of his practice. Referencing postwar Taiwanese identity through the titular terms, the work traces both division and connection in its organic network, each line both boundary and bridge, each void charged with history.
Together, Hsu’s works form a constellation of mark and motion, at once grounded in cultural specificity and elevated into universality. Whether through immersive wallscapes, weightless silk currents, or micro-line topographies, he invites the viewer into states of flux: memory dissolving into texture, gesture stretching across time, identity traced not in declaration but in drift.
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During/Diasporic Movement, Peter Hsu, 2022, ink on canvas, 154 x 222 cm. / 60.6 x 48 in.
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