HSIA YANG (China, Shanghai, 1932) Lot n° 43

HSIA YANG (China, Shanghai, 1932) Untitled. Mixed media on paper. Signed in the lower right corner. Measurements: 33 x 55 cm; 37 x 58 cm (frame). Throughout his long and varied career, Hsia has developed a wide range of visual languages. In 1951, Hsia studied art with Lee Chun-Shan and later formed the Ton Fan Group with seven other artists. In 1963, he traveled to Europe for the first time and settled in Paris for five years. In 1968, he moved to New York and, in 1992, returned to Taipei. From 2002, Hsia moved to Shanghai, where she has lived ever since. His experience in the art world has been rich and varied. In 2018, she held a retrospective at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan. Hsia was living in New York in the 1970s, when photorealism became popular and this influenced his painting style. He began to depict scenes of people moving in urban landscapes, paying close attention to the details of these scenes and simulating hurried movement by blurring these parts. In the second half of the 1990s, Hsia continued his series of blurred people with 100 Faces (1994 - 1996) and Thirty-Six Portraits (2002), which are considered the most vivid expressions of his formal blurring technique. After 1999, Hsia developed a series of iron sculptures based on the same theme, exploring and transforming his pictorial language with a new medium. Since 2002, Hsia has been using paper-cut collage techniques and introducing witty verses into his paintings, especially in his monumental landscapes that include contemporary scenes of urban leisure.