Chia Huang

English Translation：

I am particularly sensitive to human bodies. When drawing, I'm looking for a hole in the human body. That hole is actually an abstract hole, from where the the subject's hidden part, a part she does not know, flows out. Like a surfer waiting for the wave, I draw people while looking for the wave in their bodies. To me, by virtue of their mutual flowing, waves are bodies, and bodies are waves.

English Translation：

During the whole drawing process for this picture, I was astonished. I didn’t understand why he looked so strange. I have a sharp sensitivity to people in this world such that, when I look at them, I feel exceptionally stimulated. This heightened stimulation is like an unspeakable secret, which is brought out of me without permission. So, throughout this and other drawing processes, I continue to be shocked. Fear, without an exact danger to be fearful of, exhilarates me. These emotional contrasts and the feeling of floating without a place to land make me happy.

Now, I’m sitting on a chair listening repeatedly to the same song, and he is drawing beside me. Drawing in moments like these sets me free. I’m concentrated to the point of being in a state of continuous shock, as if the world has expanded to the point of limitlessness. And what’s magical is that if I look at other people, but I’m not drawing them, I’m not shocked by their bodies. For me, watching and expressing at the same time are prerequisites for this concentration, and the excitement or even panic that can occur.

English Translation：

I sometimes find that I can only draw someone abstractly without a clear figure. For example, when I drew Mimi, I initially felt that Mimi didn’t need to have a head. Because the purity of her existence needs to be presented in an abstract way. But I didn’t trust this intuition. So, as I continued and drew her head, I still felt that it wasn’t right, and that she was more present in the drawing without the understandable shape. Listening to my intuition while painting is mysterious, because my intuitions often sound very weird.

I discover in my drawing process that there are at least two of me coexisting. The first is the “crazy me”, the second me is “jury me.” And of these two, I want to believe that the crazy me will always lead me in the right direction. But even this me is further divided between a me that functions from a place of personal truth, and another that is out-of-the-loop and disconnected. So, to decipher the mystery of listening to my intuition while drawing is to identify and listen to the right me. 

English Translation： 

Every time that I draw, a theory arises in me, as I amuse myself by discovering the purpose of each action I take. This theory is that my drawings are games with different rules, depending on the person I am drawing. These rules are not carved in stone, and vary from person to person. The rules of each picture and of how I am to create it arise spontaneously in me, as though handed down from the clouds. And so, while drawing one person, it may be as though I’m playing Chess, working with an intuited rigidity to decipher the person’s essence. Another person may invite me to follow rules akin to those of Hide and Seek, and I must search them out. My drawing, then, is itself a greater game. It is the game of deciphering which lesser game must be played to uncode the secret of each subject’s life. Though the games’ rules seem handed down from the clouds, they originate in me. And so, I am at once the game-creator and game player, carefully observing the lines of people’s bodies to find out what games must be played.

English Translation： 

Recently, I’ve been waking up early in the morning to meditate. My purpose in meditation is to find a hole in the universe, available at this special time, where I can tune into the vibrations of a cosmic radio station. After tuning in, when I draw, I start to observe both the people I draw and my own process of creation, including my own impulse to stop when there is nothing left to add or take away.

Tuned into this station, there is no delay between my discoveries and actions, and so I experience both simultaneously, enabling me to flow as all in nature does. And so, when I am practicing drawing, I am searching for a way of living, in which no part of me is delayed.

English Translation：

I am going to walk around Taiwan. I want to digest the last project through the continuous movement of my body. My body continues to move. Through moving, it becomes a conveyor belt. The space on the conveyor belt is being cleared. I like this kind of expression, that my hands and my eyes are unsynchronized, missing an imagined meeting point where they might work in tandem. This empty space reminds me of five months ago, working with people with autism on art in Taitung. When they showed their work, they’d look at the spectator slowly and sincerely, but seemed to see no one. 

English Translation：

While drawing, I search for the holes on the human body from where excretions flow out. And I use my sense of smell to detect these holes. So, when I open my mouth, I only ask those questions that I would often stop myself from speaking because what I would say is irrelevant. Just like a fly, I follow the scent without choice. In everyone’s mind there lives gloomy sage, and for me all the things those minds experience as scary, evil, weird, and unexpected are arranged by that sage. I want to befriend that sage, who commands the currents of these fluids from within.