Born in Chiayi, Taiwan in 1980, HSIAO Chu-Fang graduated from the Tainan National University of the Arts College of Visual Arts in 2008. She is a recipient of the S-An Cultural Foundation Award and Honorable Mention in the Taipei Art Awards. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Foundation Sacatar in Salvador, Brazil in 2010 and at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, USA in 2013.
Through sketches, HSIAO Chu-Fang collects incidents and snippets from everyday life, turning them into thematic material for painting. Adept at using simple colors and lines, HSIAO brings together the fragmented feelings from real life into a coherent whole, expressing little things that seem insignificant, yet are simply profound, in a lighthearted, humorous style. Most of her works are character driven, with distinct personalities, reflecting people’s varied emotional states. The characters she depicts with her brush are alternately comical and humorous, or quiet and contemplative. Using clean, assertive lines and bright colors, ordinary scenes of life are turned into nonsensical humorous imagination, where humor is used to alleviate the little sorrows in life.
HSIAO’s paintings have seemed to have deceptively spontaneous and casual compositions in the past. In fact, in every case HSIAO has endured a painstaking process of making a draft of each work, adding a little here or subtracting there, and then projecting the draft onto the canvas as a guide to present what she feels is the perfect result. “After relying on a computer and projector for so long, I find myself increasingly unable to get away from these tools. Not only that, but it has changed my lifestyle, so I've become more of a neat freak,” says HSIAO. After taking time to settle down and adjust her pace, and get her feel back through pottery, the reappearance of brush strokes has lent greater interest to HSIAO Chu-Fang’s paintings in recent years.
The artist says, “I should create by hand, not with machines. I need to get away from relying on machines, or my art will be unable to progress.”
