Born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1976
Lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan
Su Meng-Hung graduated from the National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan, and Goldsmiths College, University of London. He received his PhD from the Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan. His 2003 solo exhibition Kai Dao Tu Mi at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, garnered critical attention. In 2008, he participated in Expenditure: Busan Biennale (Busan, Korea).
Su Meng-Hung works across such mediums as painting, silkscreen printing, installation, and sculpture in a creative process that manifests his attempt to transform traditional Chinese imagery of flowers and birds into a visual vocabulary of gaudy and grandiose icons, or into a cultural language of sensuous and appealing symbols. He often adapts elements of flowers and birds from the work of late Qing-dynasty painters. These visual symbols are not merely driven by the artist’s desire to ridicule social codes, or to popularize the symbols in mass culture.
Instead of merely representing the taste of the aristocracy and literati instantiated by these flowers and birds, he blends the contradictory forces of contemporary visual experience. This allows the viewer, while identifying cultural symbols, to enter an open or closed system, engaged in a way of thinking that hearkens back to a historical era that has long gone. If we see the blending of East and West in Giuseppe Castiglione’s painting style, then Su Meng-Hung, on the other hand, grapples with the materiality of pigments using techniques such as simulation, xipi (literally meaning rhinoceros hide, a term describing marbled lacquer surface, formed by layers of differently colored lacquer applied to an uneven surface), mother-of-pearl inlay, even cloisonné. His work ultimately responds to the re-amalgamation of Eastern and Western craft histories, while interrogating the production of art within capitalism.
Su’s notable solo exhibitions include Self-Exoticism, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2021); Xiang Nai Er, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2019); A Painter of the Empire, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2016); Poppy, Golden Lotus, Dopamine, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan (2012); and Unreachable Blooming, IT Park, Taipei, Taiwan (2007). He has also participated in international exhibitions and biennials, including Dialogue on Printmaking — The Taiwan-U.S. Exchange Exhibition, Taiwan Academy, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, New York, U.S. (2016); Taipei Biennial (2014), Taiwan; and Jam — Cultural Congestions in Contemporary Asian Art, South Hill Park Art Centre, Bracknell, U.K. (2009).