Wei-Hui Hsu left Taiwan to study in the United States in 2004 and received her MA degree in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, and received her MFA degree from the Fiber Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Ever since then, her format of art has been based on the structures of our body tissue, and she has probed into topics like female consciousness, cultural identity, and differences in values through her personal life experience. As for the media she uses for her creations, she prefers to use the ready-mades in our daily life, trying to discover the sense of beauty and the symbolic meaning out of the objects. Since 2006, she has begun to extensively use the commercially available facial masks to create her works, and developed different styles of work, ranging from two-dimensional to three-dimensional and to full-scale installations. Moreover, the core of her creation has always been focused on digging into the hidden anxiety and the secretive conflicts underneath the women’s beauty underneath the skin.
Hsu’s solo exhibition at MOCA Studio Unfinished Journey this time has made the corridor and the two galleries become a trilogical experience space, from which Hsu presents the diverse creations with other media in daily life, from facial masks to other objects. First of all, the corridor is used to present her works of space installation Path: Unfinished Road, which implies a woman’s sensitive feelings and her seeking process in love and marriage. On the two ends of the road, the artist builds two separate spaces in the galleries, Brightness: Flower of Life—Bloom and Dimness: Wavering Time, that represent different minds: one is brightness, the other is darkness, and the audience is free to choose which one they want to see first.
As a whole, the exhibition invites the audience to step about among the three spaces with three different themes to read Hsu’s reflection on the portrayal of the contemporary society and pop culture, the orientation of life values, and the self-reflection from Hsu’s own female experience. The pursuit of perfection is always accompanied with anxiety about the flowing time and the myth about which path to take. Art might not be able to provide satisfying answers as to how modern people should confront and handle these questions of life, but at least, art can push us to think and practice from a new point of view.