HSU Yin Ling: All Happy Returns

The solo exhibition All Happy Returns is the first collaboration between Gallery EXIT and the Taiwanese artist HSU Yin Ling. Paintings featured in All Happy Returns are all revolved around a character created by the artist – a taxidermist who is insentient to emotions, and thus different from most of the people, he has no way to attain any sense of belonging through love, the relationship with others and society. One solution to his cogitation is to physically embody these emotions and abstract relationships. He starts garnering chunks and pieces about human beings and bringing them together with redefined objects from himself into a collage of human gestures nuancing variegated emotions ratified by generic cognition. By displaying all this in front of himself, the taxidermist self-imposes an era of re-education regarding human nature.

HSU’s subject matter has always been focusing on human behaviors and mental states. Her observed persons are the exact reflection of our existence in society. Every behavior comes about for the sake of “Someone” ‘s existence. The artist transforms this mode of life into varied elements and superimposes them on her created character. The scene in her works is taken from some everyday fragments through the process of exaggeration, while the collaged elements in the scene are taken from fragmented memories that once ran past our mind. Marrying the two parts sparks a distance that is both proximate to reality and yet inscrutable to common sense. HSU hopes that her spectators, while standing in front of these much gravitated elements, would be struck instantly by a covert comfort through re-experiencing experienced moments; meanwhile, they would also feel constantly anxious about being surveilled. This is the totalitarian power from any civilized society – those who fall outside the default system failing to integrate into the set rhythm only feel overwrought; in the meantime, the violence of civilization sequesters anyone who fails to be incorporated outside reality as pariahs. We are, inconspicuously and collectively, sunk into an enormous lethargy because of our inveterate penchant for acting out our instrumentality to complete our society and for forgetting the quintessence of Being itself.