IN ANIMAL MANNER
Solo exhibition by Ina Hsu,
curated by Ivana Marjanović, director of Kunstraum Innsbruck
In Animal Manner
shows a number of imaginative ways in which the artist Shian-Fong Hsu a.k.a. Ina Hsu visualises wild animals and the ways of managing life on planet Earth. For tapirs, monkeys, bears, bees as well as for us human animals the all-important thing is habitat and resources of life. Ina Hsu provides us with impulses for narrating other stories about the interconnections on the planet. Not the story about selfish, predatory, exploitative, individualist relationships but the one about organising life in collective, playful, solidary, yet sometimes dangerous, but definitely mutually dependent ways. Instead of moralising, or being judgmental, Hsu’s artistic work is inspiring and engaging. It is a call for our contribution to the future of caring in the ongoing entanglement of all life on Earth and the interconnectedness of species.
SHIANG -FONG HSU a.k.a. INA HSU
was born into a Taiwanese family in Innsbruck in 1976. She lives and works as a painter, illustrator and educator in Kufstein and Innsbruck.
* We are very happy to reopen Kunstraum Innsbruck with the new show! We will inform the public one week before the beginning of the exhibition date about the conditions for visiting the exhibition. Due to COVID restrictions there won’t be a big opening event and we won’t be organising any events in June. But we will be offering free guided tours also for single visitors. Please ask for a tour at the info desk or schedule one via office@kunstraum-innsbruck.at
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The exhibition presents artworks inspired by close observation of nature around us, fictional stories about animals, but also by concerns about ongoing ecological damage on the planet. Different wisdoms, creative and scientific traditions, including those from the “Global South”, inform Hsu’s work. Her experiences of growing up in Tyrol, while “not belonging” entirely, and living with and loving animals through companionship and comradeship are some of the important impulses in her work. Her large-scale, naturalistically crafted paintings show animals (and sometimes humans) coexisting in a free habitat. The realistic, meticulously and precisely depicted subjects of Hsu’s paintings are contrasted with monochrome backgrounds emphasising the power of the protagonists.
In Animal Manner celebrates the agency of life, of wild life, and the beauty of sustaining symbiotic relationships that are the core condition of evolution and survival (also for humans). It is the story of the wonders of nature that we are part of. In this animal manner, that is the manner of nature, the boundaries between species dissolve, the autonomy and integrity of human, animal or plant gets blurred, putting the focus on the worlds of cohabitation and symbiotic alliances of co-species.
The exhibition presents artworks that have been created since 2014, including a number of new paintings produced in 2019 and 2020 specially for the exhibition at Kunstraum Innsbruck. The display is divided into several “chapters”, thus creating conceptual units based on the motives and the narrative of the exhibition, its storytelling.
Prologue. The Law of Attraction
The exhibition opens with a painting entitled “Shall I, or shall I not” (2020), depicting a kangaroo chewing gum and blowing bubbles, which draws birds and insects to fly towards it. Positioned next to the self-portrait by Hsu blowing a bubble (2016), the two paintings create a unit: the artist as a member of the human animal species, whose artistic world we are entering, and the different animal species inhabiting this world. An atmosphere of playfulness, of joy and fun pervades these paintings, but also a feeling of uncertainty about maybe being caught in a strange human-made sticky bubble trap. So the exhibition starts with a contradiction. Planet Earth is a place of wonder and magic, but it is also a site of dread and danger. In the next scene (the painting “Emma” of 2015), Ina Hsu, sitting on an oversized rabbit, as in a fairytale, whispers something into the animal’s ear while the rabbit attentively listens. What are they up to?
The main exhibition space opens with paintings of wild animals from various corners of the world, including, among others, those still left in the Alpine forests as well as endangered species, likely to become extinct in the near future.
Survival Strategies. In Search of Equilibrium
Surviving on Earth for many wild animals means finding solutions to adjust to humans. It means finding ways while being exploited “working” for humans, living in spaces artificially created for animals, looking for alternatives in limited wildlife areas affected by deforestation, damming of rivers and other interventions characteristic for the Anthropocene age (the current geological age dominated by human destructive effects on climate and the environment).
In such a context, the Asian tapir, as a nocturnal animal that enjoys spending time in water, has to take its bath on Sunday night in an inflatable paddling pool where she meets her monkey friends, the common marmoset and the red-shanked douc. Having their Sunday chat, filled with a sense of melancholia, these companion species rest and relax, making the best out of the situation (“A bath on Sunday night”, 2016). The Amazonian tamarin monkey, depicted on another painting situated nearby, also takes the nighttime for herself, blowing bubbles this time not to entertain humans but her babies that she carries on her back (“Blowing Bubbles”, 2014). In the darkness of the night, hummingbirds, microbats and bumblebees try to take nectar from a giant inflatable plastic flower (“The Great Nature Banquet”, 2020). In the daylight, three pandas climb on each other’s shoulders, trying to maintain a difficult balance with the help of a watermelon (“Das Panda Spiel”, 2016). The title alludes to a game. But referring to the animal serving as a symbol for the current state of things in ecology it also hints at the struggle for survival, the lack of space for life and the conditions of zoo life. Three kiwis, the emblematic birds from New Zealand that can’t fly and whose feathers look like fur, also perform similar acrobatic balancing postures, while at the same time trying to hunt a flying maybug using flowers as a lure (“Süßer Nektar”, 2019). Life is a fragile balance for all on the planet, the removal of one element will have an effect on everybody else. Sustaining the equilibrium requires collective efforts and we see the animals managing the impossible.
Playing Games. Co-Habitation and Symbiotic Alliances
The atmosphere of playfulness, as a constructive force in facing the challenges of the Anthropocene, continues also when humans come on the scene. The humans portrayed are “place holders” and their selection reflects the artist’s surroundings. The game-playing raises questions here of the sincerity of intentions, power relations and roles, but it refers also to a possibility, a proposal for maintaining respectful relationships where creatures share a habitat (“Caro”, 2014; “Das Versteck der Muntjacks”, 2014).
This other story of sharing and caring acquires an emblematic status of inter-species relationships with “Maria II” (2015), where a woman becomes not only a playground for animals, the Tamias squirrels (“Maria I 2015), but she appears as an ecosystem containing other ecosystems. She is a habitat for both plants and animals and they are a habitat for her. Here we come to the core statement to be read from Ina Hsu’s work: this is the world of symbiosis, of symbiotic entanglement. The painting, that shows moss growing on the skin of the woman, “stages” what in the case of humans is visible only on the microscopic scale, namely that the human body is not only human. At least half of it consists of non-human cells of various microorganisms. And this applies to all life on Earth. All bodies are diverse ecosystems. Nature is a network of symbiotic partnerships that maintain life. Co-habitation is not a goal. It is a fact of life. Researchers have shown that tiniest changes in this complicated network (or, even worse, the loss of a species) causes a chain reaction and is likely to be destructive in sustaining life (also for humans.)* Hsu suggests here making even more of an effort, physical and emotional, just as the woman does with her strange posture of making space for all that diverse life of “her” body.
A number of imaginary ecosystems where animals and plants grow on each other, bodies contain other bodies, organisms enfold organisms as a creative vision, in the context of the scarcity of living space, opens in front of us. A kingdom of fungi merges with the other life kingdoms of plants and animals showing the power of life on Earth (“Drei Tiger und die Mandschurenkraniche”, 2014; “Forest I”, 2015; “Hidden Habitat”, 2016; “Forest II”, 2016, “New Habitat”, 2019; “Mobile Habitat”, 2020).
Sammelsurium. Post Scriptum
The exhibition ends in the project room, the smaller exhibition space of the Kunstraum Innsbruck, where some of the selected materials from the artist’s studio give an insight into the artist’s work processes and inspirations, such as notes, study materials, things found in nature, books etc., as well as a couple of additional smaller-scale artworks, such as paper works and a few small-format wood paintings.
In her animal paintings with monochrome backgrounds, that Ina Hsu has been developing since 2010, the omission of the space in which animals are placed moves the actors of wildlife themselves centre stage. Isolating them visually (with or without humans) from the context is the artist’s way of capturing the force of animal life. Hence, wild animals slowly shed the role of merely representing or accompanying humans (as in some fairytales and other stories). Developing her portrait technique over recent years into an even more realistic direction, giving up the self-referential artistic gestures of paint dripping and fast brush strokes (of the previous phase**), Ina Hsu deepens her artistic contribution to the long (artistic) history of human-animal relationships and animal representation, creating an inspiring vision for the current debates on the future of living and dying on Earth. It is a vision of humans and wild animals living together, a vision that strongly desires and hence imagines a world in which humans and animals could share the planet equally, live on it together, loving and taking care of each other. A creative vision that comes to us in the moment of pandemic crisis. A vision to make us think twice as to how we go on acting on this planet.
*The book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene is a great source of information on the topic (University of Minnesota Press 2017, eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt)
** See the text by Rosanna Dematté and Ina Hsu’s works in the catalogue Ina Hsu, Beloved Beast of 2012 and the artist’s web page http://www.ina-hsu.com/http://www.ina-hsu.com/
Text: Dr. Ivana Marjanović, Kunstraum Innsbruck director
SHIANG -FONG HSU a.k.a. INA HSU
was born into a Taiwanese family in Innsbruck in 1976. She lives and works as a painter, illustrator and educator in Kufstein and Innsbruck. Education: IFOG Akademie für Graphik-Design/Academy for Graphic Design, Munich, degree 1996 (D). Kunstuniversität Linz, Malerei und Graphik/Painting and Graphic Arts (Ursula Hübner), degree 2006 (A). Numerous projects, fellowships and awards. Numerous solo and group exhibitions, e.g. Found Paradise, Galerie im Andechshof, Innsbruck; Kunst im Studio – Ina Hsu, ORF Landesstudio Tirol, Innsbruck; … oh rainbow – Sonderschau Junge Kunst, ART Innsbruck; BELOVED BEAST, UNO St. Claude Gallery, New Orleans (USA); IN THE BACK OF BEYOND, Galerie Goldener Engl, Hall in Tirol; Voyage à contre-courant, Parallel Vienna, Vienna.
Read more: http://www.ina-hsu.com/
