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.
Yet in traditional Chinese painting, liubai (empty space) serves not only a visual or philosophical function but also a literal one—as a space for poetry and calligraphy. This integration of painting, poetry and calligraphy forms what is known as the “Three Perfections.” To be a true member of the literati—a true scholar—one had to master all three.
One of the works by Pu Ru on view, Beauty Chasing Butterflies, was gifted to Hung Hsien by the master himself as a farewell as she prepared to leave for the United States. In this piece, Ru’s calligraphy is a poem wishing her well as she sets out for Hong Kong. By 1957, Hung Hsien already knew she would marry T.C. Chang, an architect and urban planner who later worked for the United Nations and eventually settled in the United States, first in Chicago and later in Houston, where Hung Hsien maintained a studio near Hermann Park for more than four decades. As the curator notes, the work makes clear that Ru held her in high regard.
Hung Hsien painted the image and added the inscription. In Chinese painting, it is common for others to write on a finished work, adding inscriptions or colophons. Far from being intrusive, this is a respected tradition. As the curator explains, there are famous scrolls with hundreds of inscriptions—long handscrolls expanded over generations by collectors, students and admirers alike.
Once Hung Hsien moved to the United States, she went by Margaret Chang socially, but professionally, she kept her own name and the authority she had begun to establish in Taiwan. Many of her early works traveled with her and remained in her estate. She began selling some only later in life, as her work gained attention and was shown publicly in the U.S. Exposed to various strands of postwar abstraction, and particularly drawn to the work of artists like Mark Tobey and Arshile Gorky, Hung Hsien embarked on fearless experimentation across the ocean, pushing the philosophical and aesthetic boundaries of traditional ink painting even further.
When she enrolled in a graduate program at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, she faced the dual challenge of learning a new language and confronting a very different pictorial approach that encouraged a more conceptual and imaginative attitude than the disciplined training she had received in Taiwan. Yet it was precisely in the philosophical foundation of Eastern ink painting that she found her way to a more visionary and transcendentally evocative form of abstraction still inspired by nature, but seeking to manifest its invisible forces and energetic currents in an image.
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
After several experiments with oil, Hung Hsien returned to ink, freely exploring its “boneless” quality, embracing the medium’s fluid and continuous essence that resists the confines of any mark. In Forest (1965), trees and mountains become a living entity, rendered through a tapestry of sweeping, drifting brushstrokes that capture not just foliage but the wind animating it. The blurring in these works gives them breath, making them pulse and vibrate. The fields of color seem to inhale and exhale, to shimmer and settle, creating a visceral experience that transcends any need for fixed form or figure.
With the space race and the moon landing marking the transition into the 1970s, Hung Hsien began to explore increasingly celestial and cosmic dimensions. This shift produced visionary works like Study for Celestial Globes (1970), which radiates a psychedelic, almost hallucinatory sense of time and space. The painting evokes a voyage through the mysteries of distant galaxies as well as the atomic fabric of the universe. Around this time, Hung Hsien was invited to join Taiwan’s Fifth Moon Group, a collective attuned to cultural and scientific developments that challenged and expanded the boundaries of perception, calling for a new visual language, an art capable of both translating and anticipating new states of awareness.
Working between the micro and macro scales, Hung Hsien used ink abstraction to express her heightened attunement to qi, channeling the universal cycles of generation, transformation, decay and renewal. Her paintings from this period possess a cosmic yet transcendental and ethereal quality, while also touching on organic and biological forms. Floating Without End (1970), for instance, seems to anticipate both today’s astronomical images captured by advanced telescopes and the microscopic visuals of cellular reproduction and growth. In a continuous oscillation between form and void, movement and stillness, shades of indigo blue, soft peach and muted black flow like wind, waves or living structures in motion. These forms converge and disperse into infinite configurations, animated by the swirling life force of qi, without ever reaching resolution, yet never dissolving completely.
This vibrant, monumental painting is also autobiographical, as the curator reveals, translating Hung Hsien’s fluid existence between worlds, languages and identities. Her work embraces this perpetual state of flux not as instability but as a source of endless evolution and transformation. This is what makes her practice singular: a fearless experimentation with abstraction to manifest the invisible, while rigorously rooted in ancient philosophical and spiritual principles that connect painting to a more universal role and responsibility.
In fact, “Spirit Resonance, Life-Movement” is one of the core “Six Principles of Chinese Painting” formulated by Xie He in the 6th Century that remain foundational to traditional Chinese art theory today. A painting, according to this framework, must be infused with qi—the vital force or life energy—and animated by an internal spirit. In the act of painting, the artist becomes a vessel through which qi is transferred to the surface via the “structural use of the brush”: strength, rhythm and precision in fully conscious yet intuitive strokes.
As an artist, both skill and moral character are measured by the ability to cultivate qi through repetition, patience and intentional stillness. It is not merely mystical but a disciplined sensitivity, a refined attunement sharpened through practice.
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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