THE COLOURS OF CH’AN (Les Couleurs du zen): TRIBUTE TO HSIAO CHIN (Peintures de Hsiao Chin)

Produced with the assistance of the Hsiao Chin International Foundation (Taipei), the exhibition presents a corpus representative of the great moments of the work of painter Hsiao Chin born in Shanghai in 1935, initiator of the Italian movement Punto (1961-1966). His work mixes influence American abstract expressionism, the spiritual and performative painting of the Gutai group in Japan, producing a singular colored abstraction.

Hsiao Chin embodies the visionary figure of a Chinese artist whose entire work represents an opening and exchanges on the world and its cultures.

Les Couleurs du Zen is the first exhibition in a European museum by the painter Hsiao Chin which has been the subject of numerous exhibitions or retrospectives in the largest Asian museums, including the Shanghai China Art Museum in 2018. A selection of works presents the Hsiao Chin's artistic evolutions since the 1950s, through a Zen inspired selection from the Foundation's collections as well as from European and Asian private collections and archives. It was in the 1960s that he founded in Milan from the teachings of Zen philosophy and especially the "spirit of contemplation" the Punto movement (1961-1966) alongside Lucio Fontana. Punto is the first and only Western art school created in the 20th century by a Chinese artist. Punto, in Italian "point", refers to the Far Eastern design from which all things are in one.

In the 1970s, Hsiao Chin left Italy to teach painting in the United States where he met Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning and then became interested in abstract expressionism. From his cosmopolitan vocation which made him go through Japan where he frequented the painters of the Gutai group, the profoundly universal work, made of crossbreeding, crosses the history of abstract art of the 20th century. A path of signs and an ode to the purity of the gesture emerge. In a series entitled Dancing Light, Hsiao Chin retains the art of the gesture of the legacy of Chinese calligraphy, like a journey of signs.

This exhibition is presented at the Heidelbach Hotel in the temporary exhibition space.