EXHIBITED:
Reflections of the Seventies: Taiwan Explores its Own Reality ,
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, February 14 - May 16, 2004
ILLUSTRATED:
Reflections of the Seventies: Taiwan Explores its Own Reality ,
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2004, color illustrated, p. 157

PEDESTRIAN NO.1
HSIA YAN

Hsia Yan was born in 1932 in Hunan, China, and came to Taiwan in 1949 along with the Nationalists. He learned tecniques of painting from the senior artist Li Chun-Shan, and established the "Group of Oriental Painters" with other art students. He was also a member of "The Eight Bandits," a group that challenged the traditional art forms. He then went to Paris alone to learn Western art, and started composing the works for the series "The Furry People". In 1968, he settled in New York, and, influenced by photorealism, he painted New York sceneries with great precision. For instance, the blurry pedestrians in his paintings seem to be the work of long exposure photography. From 1990 and onwards, Hsia redirected his attention to folk art and arts based on traditional myths. It is also in this decade that he developed the metal slices for "The Furry People". Hsia Yan moved back to Taipei in 1999 and has been living in Shanghai since 2002. He once said, "The real communication in art happens when local artists incorporate titbits of foreign culture into their art, but still keep the local style as the pillar of their work." With this philosophy in mind, Hsia Yan has always reproduced the speediness and bustling of modern society vividly on canvas. This sort of existence bears a bit of emptiness and loneliness.

This work was created in 1973. It was during the time when pop art was spreading in the US and photorealism was rising. In this contemporary art movement, Hsia Yan also became a representative for photorealism in New York. Spontaneous images and ideas freely roam in Yan’s careful and detailed composition and are expressed with the artist’s unique skills. The picture seems to be frozen at the momentary "present", and it is impossible to discern the length of the present – because all that is presented is the walk at the very instant. And this freeze-frame shot of walk is not tied to time; it may be a moment of the past, the present, or even the coming future. There is always much space for imagination in Hsia Yan’s art, and all elements fit together quite naturally. Only an artist who readily gets inspired from their surroundings can create such excellent work.

Having spent his time in three continents, Europe, America, and East Asia, Hsia Yan is deservedly named as a pioneer in Taiwan’s contemporary art. Hsia has always been a careful observer and learner of art history. His inspiration has come from neoclassicism, Léger’s tubism, expressionism, and surrealism. Furthermore, he has also explored folk art and the theory of lines and structures in Chinese art. This has helped him develop a good grasp of the critical differences between Oriental and Western art. Using his knowledge in abstract art and techniques for color contrast, Hsia paints the lights and shadows against the dark background skillfully, clearly capturing both the "pictorial" and the "expressional" in his works.