Brook Hsu

Taiwanese-American artist Brook Hsu grew up in Oklahoma, received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016, and is presently based in New York. She is known for interweaving the fantastical, the mythopoetic and the autobiographical through an array of mediums, creating a distinct species of apparitional, haunting imagery. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, writing and felt making, Hsu produces abstract and figurative works that employ a host of pagan signs and motifs, most notably the demigod of Pan, recounting stories of love, pain and humour. Her art, which focuses on examining pre-Christian myths, histories, modern literature, films and personal histories is at once psychedelic and tranquil, revealing the ways in which existing narratives can induce fear, anxiety, joy and sadness in the contemporary time. Depicting voluptuous, emaciated, demonic, satyric bodies, fashioning shroud-like, torn and ephemeral clothing, or reanimating memories of her beloved dog in the form of a clay boot, Hsu masterfully associates disparate themes and subjects, revisits forsaken icons, and invents new forms.