Asia University (AU) Museum of Modern Art holds the exhibition “The Distant Planet: The Art of Chung-Hsiang Chao.” The curator and organizer select 69 works among the collections of important collectors and organizations from Taiwan and Hong Kong according to the spatial feature of AU Museum of Modern Art. The artworks showcase includes sketches, small practice drawings, and tools of the artist once used. The total value of the insurance for these items is up to 950 million NT dollars. The exhibition time is from April 13 to July 7.

The director of the museum, Mei-Ling Lee, says that Chung-Hsiang Chao (1910-1991) is one of the most important figures in Chinese modern art history. He was trained in Hangzhou National College of Art. He and several of his contemporaries, Wou-ki Zao, Teh-Chun Chu, and Chanzhong Wu, were known as the best students of art master Fengmian Lin (1900-1991). All of these artists, after living abroad for several decades since the 1950s, faced the same challenge of breaking the traditions in Chinese art. Moreover, they have become a new task force for promoting the Chinese contemporary art movement, and the practitioners who focus on practicing the art experiment of merging both Chinese and Western arts.

“The title of the exhibition ‘The Distant Planet’ is inspired by a artwork of Chung-Hsiang Chao completed in 1986,” said by the curator of the exhibition, Jason Chia Chi Wang. In the meantime, he explained that starting from 1960s, the artist preferred to naming his works with cosmos-related titles. The name “The Distant Planet” can be easily associated with a sense of distance, journey, disconnection, and loneness. It also can be seen as a reflection of Chao’s life — a life-long migration, separation, and exile. Chao’s life history was represented as the epitome of a tragic era. He left mainland China to Taiwan because of the civil war. Later, he was recommended by the Cardinal Paul Pin Yu to study further in Spain. After that, he moved to New York via Paris, and had a long-term living here for 32 years before returned to Taiwan. Although Chao lived in western countries for more than 30 years, he never gave up ink art. He had a special linking for the aesthetics of ink and Shuan paper; and this is the reason for him to attempt merging splash ink into his creation while creating abstract oil paintings.

The curator, Jason Chia Chi Wang, points out that the artworks of Chung-Hsiang Chao constantly derived inspiration from Chinese traditional cosmology. He transformed the concepts of Tai-Chi and I-Ching into abstract circles, spheroids, halos, and light spots to express the imagination of Chinese aesthetics and philosophy. Meanwhile, he also used typical Western painting methods including the uses of geometric shapes, collage pictures, and paint splashing. These compound art-creation methods made him become one of the important promoters of the development of Chinese contemporary art movement. In particular, viewers can see the different layers of spiritual space contained in Chao’s paintings. Through the creations, he transformed his solitary, and uneasy life into inspirations to express his inner thinking. For example, the imagery of candlelight appeared in his paintings very often; in addition to making audiences to think of blessings, prayers, and conversions, this also seems to imply the inner desires of Chao to gain spiritual guidance and relief.

The exhibition “The Distant Planet: The Art of Chung-Hsiang Chao” is the only systematic exhibition of Chao’s series works in Taiwan since the last exhibition “Love the Cosmos: The Art of Chung-Hsiang Chao,” which was held by National Museum of History in 2004. In fact, the Guggenheim Museum in New York has permanently collected five artworks of Chung-Hsiang Chao in 1962, and this was also the first collections of Chinese contemporary art for the museum.

AU President, Jeffrey J. P. Tsai, emphasized that this exhibition is a backtracking of the creative career of artist Chung-Hsiang Chao, and it can be seen as an extension of the exhibition “Infinites of Wou-Ki Zao” in 2017. The exhibitions are important for AU Museum of Modern Art because it intends to study the context of the 20th century Chinese art and the depth research of Chinese contemporary painting. In addition, President Tsai welcomes everyone to visit the museum.