Revealed．Existence: Ku Ho-Chung Solo Exhibition

"Reveal" the True Existence to Achieve the Complete Self

The topic of "revealed existence" first appeared in Ku's first solo exhibition in 1999. Throughout the years, he has not changed much, and the exhibition title has come to have a sentimental value for him, as if it were an old friend. In the meantime, it also showed the fact that Ku has persistently painted oil still life as a way of conducting spiritual practice. In fact, his still life painting began with an empty white porcelain plate: "I started painting still life because of a white porcelain plate. I used to take a moment to relax after each meal, and I would always look at the plate intently as if it were a precious treasure and were supposed to be placed on a pedestal to be admired. This experience led me to find some connections and gradually brought together the meanings in still life and our real world." This exhibition gathers Ku's nineteen representative paintings created between 1999 to 2017. These paintings mainly feature ordinary objects found in daily life, ranging from tableware, food to utensils. However, through the artist's intuitive and direct delineation - be it an empty or full utensil, the contents in the utensil, or even the marble table itself - these objects enable viewers to perceive "space," "time," and "light." Although the object depicted in the painting (including the painting itself) is of material existence, it is also a vehicle of spirituality. Therefore, the artist hopes to achieve the union of body and mind by revealing these objects' true existence.

Three paintings in this exhibition are created over the past four years and are on view for the first time. They are The Great Dharani, Anitya, and Anitya I. Unlike Ku's previous works, which focus on realistic observations of individual objects, these three paintings are visual representations of the artist's cosmic understanding. Viewing in a distance, they seem to usher viewers into an infinite universe; viewing each of the painting closely, one will respectively see a regular, spiral arrangement of pearls, many overlapping coins, and individual pearls scattered across a marble surface. Ordinary as these objects are, they seem to greet their viewers in an extraordinary way. The artist has replaced the objects usually foregrounded at the center of the images with a broader, vaster permanent emptiness. By consistently minimizing the "I," Ku has constructed a way to communicate with the cosmos and everything it contains in a more modest manner, arriving at the enlightening concept—"Form does not differ from Emptiness, and Emptiness does not differ from Form."