A New Horizon", by Fong Chung-Ray and Hung Hsien at Alisan Fine Arts

Immigrated to Taiwan as teenagers and later settled in the United States — Fong Chung-Ray in California, Hung Hsien in Texas — the two artists who give their name to "A New Horizon" were part of the Fifth Moon Group, a Taiwanese collective that advocated for the modernization of Chinese art without abandoning its cultural identity. The exhibition at Alisan Fine Arts focuses precisely on their American period, when each developed their own vocabulary from contact with the new context. Fong, who began studying Buddhism in 1987, developed an unorthodox collage technique, applying acrylic on thin plastic sheets and then transferring the resulting patterns to paper or canvas; he sometimes inserts excerpts from the Diamond Sutra into his compositions, treated as visual elements and not to be deciphered, and occasionally writes in oracle bone script, the oldest form of Chinese writing. Hung Hsien, who studied with the former Manchu prince Pu Ru before moving to the United States in 1958, had his painting transformed by contact with the post-war "Monster Roster" group and the discovery of Arshile Gorky, creating in an almost dreamlike and automatic state — a process visible in works like "Scudding Clouds & Rocks" (1970) and "Mountain Peaks" (1971), highly abstract landscapes built from expressive brushstrokes and blocks of vibrant color.