SHIU Sheng-Hung: Black Swan—Texturality of A Contingent Reality

Opening｜2026.07.17 (Fri.) 15:00
Exhibition dates｜07.17 - 08.29, 2026
Venue｜A Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan.

 

 

 

​

The “Black Swan Effect”—rare, high-impact, unpredictable risks—is more than just a term of finance and sociology; it accurately reflects the state of contemporary life. Collective anxiety, driven by fear, greed, overconfidence, and ideological conflicts, shapes an unstable and fragmented modern landscape. Reality is a complex web stemming from countless “decisions” and “judgments.” Amid external chaos, I adopt a disciplined everyday routine in my creative process to reduce noise and damage. This approach also serves as a way to cope with the uncertainty of the unknown.

 

For me, the very core of painting lies in the intuitive choices and judgments made during the creative process, as well as in how one coexists with and works with materials. Recently, I have intentionally chosen natural mineral pigments that are safer for health to create my paints. The transformation from ore to pigment involves environmental influences and the passage of time. By examining the appearances of various minerals to study their growth and mining conditions, I have traced the evolving relationships linking these pigment components to technological progress, industrial development, and even geopolitics throughout the history of human civilization. These material pigments—such as ancient red ochre, lapis lazuli, cobalt blue, YInMn Blue, and more—display diverse appearances, states, and realities shaped by different historical contexts and natural settings.

 

Choosing and proportioning material pigments involves considering their significance, aesthetic value, or visual appeal. During the iterative process of selecting substrates, priming, masking, spraying, and applying brushstrokes, each new action emerges from intuitive exploration and habitual motion. Day after day, these elements interact, converge, and then dissipate, capturing traces of psychological states, visual experiences, and the unfolding trajectory of everyday life.

 

Technically, I prefer the natural marks created by hand-torn paper tape: lines formed by controlled forces and habitual centrifugal force, with soft, slightly blurred edges. In collage, this resembles “finding a pathway” amid a process of dismantling and filtering. The use of brushes, oil pastels, and pigments leaves a direct tactile imprint, while the technique of spraying actually records bodily movements. Both intertwine on the canvas to produce gentle, nuanced transitions.

 

In recent years, being a parent has significantly shaped my creative rhythm. As evening approaches, the studio’s light gradually shifts, with cool daylight tones giving way to warm, orange-red hues, signaling the end of my workday and prompting me to transition into another essential role—as a father. The move from the studio to home creates a distinct sense of time. Intense focus during creative exploration gives way to everyday moments of being present for my child’s growth. While the world outside continues its complex, chaotic course, I briefly reconnect with the parent-child bond, experiencing simple, authentic, and straightforward emotional exchanges. The evening light thus becomes more than a natural change; it marks a psychological transition. These soft, ambiguous colors have also gradually seeped into the overall palette of my works.

 

Today, as artificial intelligence plays an increasing role in geopolitical decisions about warfare and conflict, handling decision-making, image creation, and information recognition, I focus more on experiences that cannot be easily reduced to data: how the body perceives time and how emotions cling to matter. In these works, landscape no longer merely depicts tangible terrain but becomes a projection of perceptual experience. Pigments, brushstrokes, colors, and bodily traces form a dynamic, fluid visual field, like layers that record the passage of time or residual images of conscious activity. The processes of formation and erasure, order and chaos, control and contingency in these images reflect how an individual constantly seeks balance in a rapidly changing reality, re-examining the relationship between the self and the world.