Mossy Rocks

Shanghai-born Hung Hsien trained as a classical Chinese painter under Pu Xinyu, a Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) prince who was a master of calligraphy and an acclaimed ink painter. A decade later, when she enrolled in the art department of Northwestern University in the late 1950s, she began to explore interconnections between traditional Asian brushwork and western concepts of abstraction within her paintings.

This painting plays with these ideas, while remaining thoroughly Chinese in medium, technique, and references. She rendered the curvilinear rocks that are the work’s subject in watery calligraphic brushstrokes. The limited coloration pays homage to traditional blue-and-green landscape paintings from the Tang (866–902) and Ming (1392–1644) Dynasties.

On the other hand, the rhythmic shapes of the rocks and their varied abstracted silhouettes express the emancipated forms of mid-twentieth-century American and European modern art. The balance between non-objective forms and rock-like shapes produces a dream-like vision of nature that has retreated to its origins—it is a pristine yet wild place, one that is more evoked than explicitly depicted.