Bones of a Rainbow: Hsu Pei-cheng (許旆誠) Solo Exhibition

"Bones of a Rainbow" is a seemingly contradictory image: the rainbow symbolizes transient and fluid perception, while bones imply structure and traces of existence. It is like the afterimage of light that remains after it dissipates. To me, it is like the clues left by imagination in the labyrinth of time.

—Hsu Pei-cheng (許旆誠)




Hsu Pei-cheng (許旆誠), a painter deeply in love with literature, loved to read the world he lived in like an outsider in solitude during his youth. After going through changes in life stages, he once again accepts the hustle and bustle and clamor of the world from the perspective of his children, stepping into the life journey that inevitably involves the mundane necessities. However, in the gaps between picking up and dropping off his children, what often floats into his mind are rootless flowers, butterflies fluttering in the garden, and Lin Daiyu (林黛玉) and Jia Baoyu (賈寶玉) from Dream of the Red Chamber.



Thus, after years of contemplation and deliberation, the artist created the "Flowers Yet Not Flowers" series, themed on the Twelve Beauties of Jinling from the Qing dynasty literary classic Dream of the Red Chamber. Taking "characters" as the theme—that is a new challenge compared to his past focus on depicting space and environment. Perhaps the Grand View Garden is like a utopia parallel to real life, just as Hsu Pei-cheng (許旆誠) describes it himself: "It is a garden between narrative and allegory... where memories of youth and perceptions of middle age intertwine, allowing dreams, history, and reality to permeate each other."




How does a creator, who in the past insisted on keeping a distance from the world and aspired to be a "dream reader," step by step enter the realm of human love, hate, and emotions within the complex garden accumulated by time, and how does he then distill his own unique interpretation from that chaos?




After many years away from a solo gallery exhibition, Hsu Pei-cheng (許旆誠) chooses to share with the audience at Yao Gallery (曜畫廊) his sincere confessions from recent years, born of struggle, confusion, and persistence. His unique poetry, like hard bones, continues to hum at the foundation of his creations; the difference is, under the influence of the mundane world, we see the traces life has left on the artist—gorgeous and elegant, colorful and distant, like turning page after page of distant literary classics, dreamlike and enchanting, yet piercingly visceral and moving.




The bones of a rainbow are perhaps that which is harder than matter and unseen within the heart, after the colorful illusion is lifted.