2026.05.30 － 2026.07.12
Ashes of A Rainbow: HSU Pei-Cheng Solo Exhibition
“Ashes of A Rainbow” is an image that appears paradoxical: the rainbow symbolizes fleeting and fluid perception, while bones suggest structure and traces of existence. Like light that, even after dissipating, leaves behind a visual afterimage. To me, it is like a trail left by the imagination within the labyrinth of time.
— HSU Pei-Cheng
HSU Pei-Cheng is an artist deeply enamored with literature. In his youth, he often embraced solitude like an outsider, observing the world from a distance. As life moved through different stages, he came to encounter the world anew through the eyes of his children—its bustle, its noise, its ceaseless commotion—and entered the unavoidable rhythms of everyday life, where existence is grounded in the necessities of bread and butter. Yet in the moments between dropping off and picking up his children, what would surface in his mind were rootless flowers, butterflies fluttering through a garden, and Daiyu and Baoyu from Dream of the Red Chamber.
After a years-long hiatus from solo gallery shows, HSU Pei-Cheng has chosen Gallery de Sol to share with audiences a vulnerable and heartfelt reflection on his journey through struggle, uncertainty, and perseverance. His distinctive poetic sensibility runs like an unseen skeleton beneath his work, quietly sustaining its every form. What has changed, however, is that under the influence of the hustle and bustle of everyday life, we see the traces of a life etched into the artist’s work—graceful and luminous, vivid yet enduring. Each piece unfolds like a page from a distant literary classic, dreamlike and enchanting, evoking a sense of longing while also reaching us with an immediate, visceral intensity.
This exhibition presents a new challenge that has occupied the artist’s thoughts for years: the “characters” of Dream of the Red Chamber, the literary classic of the Qing dynasty. Perhaps the Daguanyuan (大觀園) can be understood as a utopia existing parallel to our lived reality. As HSU Pei-Cheng himself describes it:
It is a garden situated somewhere between narrative and allegory… Memories of youth and the perceptions of middle age intersect within it, allowing dreams, history, and reality to permeate one another.
Throughout the creative process, HSU Pei-Cheng admits that there were moments when he considered abandoning the Flowers Are Not Flowers series, centered on the Twelve Beauties of Jinling from Dream of the Red Chamber. How does an artist who once insisted on maintaining a distance from the world, aspiring to become a creator who “reads through dreams,” gradually find his way into the tangled garden of human love and hate, desire and tragedy, accumulated through time? And how does he find his own singular interpretation within that chaos?
Fortunately, Dream of the Red Chamber ultimately remains suspended within the realm of literature. This very quality offers HSU Pei-Cheng a space in which to breathe. He can surrender himself completely to it, while also deciding freely when to let the play end. It is this contradictory yet perfectly measured depth that allows his figures to emerge vividly from within the void, like rainbows, beneath their symbolic forms and objects.
What kind of thought sustains a captivating image?
What kind of past sustains an elegant human being?
Ashes of A Rainbow are what remain in the heart after the dazzling illusion of colors has been lifted away—something unseen, yet harder and more enduring than matter itself.
In HSU Pei-Cheng’s new solo exhibition, we will encounter his courage, sincerity, and devotion to creation—the love that keeps him returning to the easel, no matter how difficult the journey may be. We will also encounter a garden that belongs entirely to him: one cultivated from the pain of growth, born from his years of wandering between an ideal world and the realities of life, with that very pain transformed into the fertile soil from which it grows.
相關連結：
“Ashes of A Rainbow” exhibition catalog
｜Exhibition Information｜
2026.05.30-2026.07.12 “Ashes of A Rainbow: HSU Pei-Cheng Solo Exhibition”
Date｜2026.05.30（Sat） – 2026.07.12（Fri）
Location｜Gallery de sol
Address｜3F, Mandarin Gallery, No.166, Dunhua N. Rd., Songshan Dist., Taipei
Hours｜Tue–Sat 1PM – 9PM（Sundays by appointment only）
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