Hsiao Ju-sung, introverted and calm, a man of focused concentration who paid meticulous attention to detail in his work, is best known for watercolors in limpid, bright colors and compact style. For Hsiao, artistic creation was a "soliloquy of the soul" and each of his paintings is like a contemplative dialogue of the artist with his own inner self. His oeuvre is also a reflection of his unwavering pursuit of a pure and simple life, a life free from external interferences in which nothing and no one could shake his convictions.

Unsurprisingly, then, the content of his paintings revolves around his thoughts and the things that captured his eye in everyday life. No matter what the specific motif, Hsiao manages to create an extremely bright and translucent effect, even though he usually employs dull, opaque colors. The shadows and shades that are so appealing in his pictures, as well as the wisps of moving air that lend extra life to his compositions, are also done in such muted shades. Hsiao arranges his compositions through bouncing dots of color, lively linework, and an application of paint that has a strong flavor of geometrization and fragmentation. His watercolors are frequently dominated by grayish-yellow, bluish-green and dark blue tones, which amply convey the profound and mysterious depths of Hsiao's inner world.

In this watercolor titled "Female" Hsiao Ju-sung uses the reflections of light falling through a glass window to weave intermingling patterns of shade and radiance. We also find that he displays his usual predilection for cold and subdued hues such as dark blue and lime-tinged yellow. In the background of the painting we discover something that often appears in Hsiao's work of the 1980s: the cryptic "silk ribbon" symbol, encapsulating the befitting mixture of the concrete and the abstract that pervades the entire picture. Hsiao obviously enjoyed the challenge that came with the glass window, a transparent object that put his expressive technique and skill to a real test. The immense clarity and translucency emanating from this piece adroitly echo Hsiao's eternal quest for a pure and true form of life, just as the objective window in the picture can be seen to echo in its dazzling illumination the artist's subjective soul.