PROVENANCE:
East Gallery, Taipei
Acquired from the above by the present owner

EXHIBITED: The 37th Ching Yun Art Exhibition, Taipei Cultural Center, Taipei, 1984

ILLUSTRATED:
Hsiao Ju-sung, Arts Publishing Co., Taipei, 2011, color illustrated, p. 122

This painting is to be sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist and issued by East Gallery.

Hsiao Ju-sung, introverted and calm, a man of 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.

Although Hsiao was inspired by a daily experience, the painting "Summer" has perfectly expressed his ideal female portrait, and built an atmosphere of elegance and tranquility through Hsiao's excellent skill on shape-forming. Hsiao had changed his expression on figures works from simply portraying to more sense of decoration, and the posture and appearances of the people in the painting "Summer" have replaced by dots ad lines what the artist created.