Discipline: Visual Art – painting

Chin Hsiao

Discipline: Visual Art – painting
MacDowell Fellowships: 1968
Chin Hsiao is a Chinese avant-garde painter and visual artist. He graduated from the Fine Arts Department of the National Taiwan Normal University in 1955 under the teachings of Chu Teh-Chun as well as Li Chun-Sen, an important figure in the development of contemporary Chinese painting. A radical of the period, Hsiao was part of the Ton-Fan Art Group, commonly hailed “the Eight Bandits” or the “Eight Great Outlaws” due to their opposition to the government, which objected to all forms of the avant-garde. The collective of artists were inspired by contemporary Western art, which was extraordinary in context, as preceding generations, drew almost exclusively from 19th century European painting. By the mid-1950s, Hsiao had developed his very first works of abstraction and was awarded the Spanish Government Scholarship to study in Spain in 1956. Drawing on spiritual symbols shared by Eastern and Western civilizations, his works visualize ideologies and seek to refine representations of beauty with pure simplicity. Starting in 1960s, Hsiao founded several important modern art movements in Europe, including the Movimento Punto (1961), the Surya Movement (1977), and the Shaki movement (1989). Art continues to be a journey of inner quest for him. Upon losing his only daughter to an accident in 1990, Hsiao had an epiphany, reconciling, accepting, and perceiving the Taoist philosophies of “rebirth.” Flying Beyond the Flower Garden, Energy of Life, and Concerto are Hsiao’s odes to life as he conquers the ultimate fear of death, with the gentle imprints of these pieces continuing to characterize his works. He has won numerous prestigious awards: the Capo d’Orlando painting prize in 1969, the Masters of Italian Painting Prize in 1975, First Achievement Award from the Li Chun-Sen Foundation of Contemporary Painting in 1989, First Prize of the XXI Premio Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea in 1993.

Studios

Sorosis

Chin Hsiao worked in the Sorosis studio.

Sorosis Studio was funded by the New York Carol Club of Sorosis. The small, masonry studio was designed by F. Winsor, Jr., the architect who also designed Savidge Library (1926) and Mixter Studio (1927). At the time of construction, the large porch on the southeast façade offered a spectacular mountain view that has since been obscured…

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