Where Ink Breathes With the Universe: Hung Hsien’s Cosmic Abstractions at Asia Society Texas
There is already something inherently abstract in the uniquely spiritual and metaphorical use of empty space in traditional Chinese painting. The liubai (留白), or “leaving blank,” transforms emptiness into a space of evocation, imagination and contemplation—where the invisible and sensually unreachable are allowed to emerge. This abstract gesture is embedded within the image itself, which conveys reality as it is felt or intuited rather than as it is seen. In artist Hung Hsien’s early, more traditional paintings, we can glimpse the seeds of her later luminous and cosmic abstractions, inspired by the natural and energetic flow of all things.
An extensive retrospective now on view at Asia Society Texas in Houston finally pays homage to her long-overlooked, richly layered and expansive oeuvre, bridging traditional Chinese ink painting with postwar abstraction. One of the most quietly innovative ink painters of the 20th Century, Hung Hsien created a body of work in constant oscillation—between East and West, between the visible and the felt. From the East, she draws a profound spiritual and philosophical grounding that allows her to push the evocative and almost mystical possibilities of abstraction ever further—inviting us closer to the invisible, tapping into the not-yet-visible and engaging with the enduring mysteries of the universe.
It wasn’t until he moved to Houston that Owen Duffy, curator and director of exhibitions at Asia Society Texas, encountered Hung Hsien’s work. Over coffee with a curator from the Denver Art Museum, he was surprised to learn that a living legend was hiding in plain sight in Houston, living not far from their institution. Now in her nineties, Hung Hsien has work in major U.S. collections, including the Harvard Art Museums, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Phoenix Art Museum. Yet broader recognition of her contributions was long delayed, likely hindered by the intersecting biases of being both a woman and Asian.
Curated by two leading scholars—Dr. Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres, a historian of modern and contemporary Chinese art, in consultation with Dr. Einor Cervone, associate curator of arts of Asia at the Denver Art Museum—this new exhibition, organized in collaboration with Asia Society Hong Kong, aims to bring overdue attention to her work. On view through September 21, the show assembles more than fifty works spanning more than 70 years, drawn from private collections and the artist’s personal archives.
Hung Hsien was born in 1933 in the Republic of China. Her father was an official in the republican government, and she came of age during an era of profound upheaval, living through World War II, the Japanese invasion and the Communist Revolution. In 1948, like millions of others, her family fled to Taiwan, where she began her path as an artist.
Her first significant teacher was Pu Ru, a renowned painter, calligrapher and scholar, cousin of China’s last emperor Puyi and a member of the Qing imperial family. Often described as one of the last great literati in the classical tradition, Pu Ru’s influence left a lasting mark on her early development.
The earliest painting in the exhibition dates to 1950, created when Hung Hsien was just 17. It reflects the influence of Pu Ru’s poetic sensibility and mastery of traditional Chinese painting. Her apprenticeship followed a classical model: students would visit his studio and watch him paint for hours. One had to be invited—and pay—but there was no formal instruction. Hung Hsien was expected to observe, absorb and then return home to practice. The process itself demanded rigorous discipline, training, memory, concentration and self-awareness.
In early works like Tree Study I and II (1952), Hung Hsien quickly mastered the use of liubai—the art of leaving space—not as emptiness but as a field of potential. These blank areas allow nature’s energy and the viewer’s imagination to extend the image into an ever-expanding field of representation. The space surrounding trees and mountains doesn’t diminish the image; it completes and enlarges it, balancing and enhancing the painted forms while offering the eye room to rest, wander and reflect—inviting solitude, silence, transience and contemplation.
The use of liubai in Chinese painting is deeply entwined with the concept of qi (氣), which translates as “vital energy,” “breath,” or “life force.” Qi flows through both ink and absence, making the composition fluid, alive and dynamically balanced. The controlled use of blank space reveals restraint, refinement and the artist’s ability to channel that energy with precision and clarity. Hung Hsien trained in this from an early age, and the works in the exhibition’s opening section already demonstrate her remarkable command, both as a painter and as a vessel for cosmic life energy.
In black-and-white landscape paintings that preceded her departure, such as Sea of Cloud (1955), we can already trace a more liberated, freehand style. Rather than focusing on natural elements themselves, Hung Hsien seeks to capture something more immaterial: the ethereal beauty of the scene. By the time we reach works like Primordial Landscape (1968), a full metamorphosis has taken place. Her approach pushes the painterly and poetic potential of ink to suggest fluid evolutions of the image rather than documenting a fixed vision of reality. Working with bold, watery gestures free of structure, she is no longer depicting the natural world; instead, she focuses on the act of mark-making as a channel for a primordial, magmatic flux of matter and energy from which all things arise.
Yet the notion of qi remains central, as does the traditional balance between control and spontaneity. Her bold brushstrokes are punctuated by moments of stillness—pauses, silences, emptiness—infusing the work with both primal dynamism and contemplative calm. These breaks in the image become as vital as the marks themselves, giving the composition the feeling of the cosmos in motion: fluid, raw and constantly becoming.
Abstraction as an interplay between mass and light, color and movement lies at the heart of luminous works like Blue Sky (1964), where floating, nebulous accumulations of brushstrokes ebb like tides, pierced by sudden flickers of light. The result is a composition that feels at once weightless and dense, like the mystery of a shifting sky shaped by atmospheric forces, moon cycles and solar rhythms. This painting was likely part of the body of work shown during Hung Hsien’s first solo exhibition at Mori Gallery in Chicago in 1965, marking a pivotal moment in her artistic evolution.
Other works from this period, like Moonlight (1965), explore a fragile tension between figuration and abstraction, the earthly and the transcendental. In Moonlight, the artist begins to carve out faint traces of the real from the blurred darkness of a nocturnal urban scene just enough to reanchor the image in physical reality. Almost immediately, that reality slips away again, dissolved into a moonlit street that seems to melt into a flowing current of light and shadow, as if turning into
As Duffy points out, it closely parallels the automatic processes explored by the Surrealists—psychic automatism, unconscious gesture, the hand moving before the mind. But in Chinese painting, qi is shaped by both spontaneity and restraint. It’s not chaos but rather practiced harmony between intention and surrender. And in Hung Hsien’s work, you feel that balance: the brush breathes, the image lives, but everything emerges from meditation and contemplation that give full agency to the interplay of mind, spirit and body.
As the third principle of Xie He’s canon states, a good painting captures the true nature or form of its subject—not just its visible appearance, but its essence. The highest level of painting arises from a fusion of technical skill, philosophical depth and moral cultivation—an ideal Hung Hsien pursued throughout her life and work.
For Hung Hsien, painting meant working for eight hours straight, sustained immersion until something emerged. As Owen Duffy recounts, Hung Hsien said her best paintings often came out of these long, uninterrupted sessions, when she entered a particular state. It had to be quiet, with no one around. Complete isolation and silence were essential to slipping into that space where the brush could move freely, almost without conscious thought. Later in life, she became highly skilled in Tai Chi, which, as Duffy notes, made perfect sense. The same principles apply: breath, balance, internal energy and the flow of qi. It is about moving from within while becoming a channel for the universe’s breath.
The result is some of the most cosmically attuned, visionary abstraction—works that translate onto canvas not just phenomena but the energy, the aura of matter in transformation, the living force that animates all things. Immersed in the energetic pull of a painting like Sunset Light in the Mountain Rocks (1990), we understand how, for Hung Hsien, painting became an act of absolute devotion—a disciplined exercise in connecting to the cosmos. She fully embraced the possibilities of abstraction to transcend the limits of our transient, earthly experience.
This quadriptych is the most monumental work in the exhibition, and also one of the last pieces Hung Hsien chose to share publicly. Today, she continues to paint in her studio, driven by the same inner need that has always guided her. But she also feels her mission as a painter has, in some sense, been fulfilled. Now that she no longer feels able to honor this rigorous, physically demanding translation of living energy with the same intensity, she has turned toward a quieter ritual—painting as contemplation, as meditation, as a filter between the visible and the invisible and bridge between worlds.
“Hung Hsien: Between Worlds” is on view at Asia Society Texas through September 26.
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