"Pastel: Symphony Poem HUNG Hsiu-Min Solo Exhibition" displays 55 of the works produced by painter Hung Hsiu-Min mainly during the past 3 years. Among them, three landscape paintings over no. 100 in size are rare large pastel works.
 
Hung Hsiu-Min graduated from the Chinese Painting Section at the National Taiwan College of Arts and the Oil Painting/Print-making Section of the Department of Art at Spain's University of Salamanca. But in spite of her comprehensive art training, she decided to take those people and things that were most important to her as the center of her life and work. She therefore embarked on the re-interpretation of the meaning of and pathway to "learning from nature" in another type of medium, and she ultimately attained the lofty artistic state of "taking nature as a teacher, drawing inspiration from within."
 
Her works exhibited at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in the spring of 2021 are varied in substance and far-ranging in topic, and include works from her Ocean series and Mountain Forest series, works depicting animals and birds, portraits, and still lifes. All of these works are inspired by her everyday experiences, and she has intentionally pursued scenes with one object in one setting, which has affirmed her attraction to the art of pastel painting. She possesses mastery of pastels' refreshing elegance and appealing warmth, and her works not only highlight her superlative expressive skill, but also, and more importantly, record her steady process of improvement through exploration and diligence effort since she chose to work with pastels in 1992.
 
While Hung Hsiu-Min's pastel paintings are indeed remarkable from the perspectives of artistic technique, creative level, and quantity of works, her forthright and selfless sharing of her hard-to-come-by method of mental cultivation is the truly distinctive thing about her approach to art. She stresses that the creation art of must be rooted in the inner stability of the heart, and she employs high brightness sparingly, keeps color tones unified, and ensures correct proportions to control the brightness and three-dimensionality of her paintings. Apart from possessing impeccable technique, she has great self-discipline, deals seriously with her subject matter, and strives for persistent improvement and challenges in her handling of the "natural living essence" in her paintings, and even the dimensions of her works. She uses her keen powers of observation like a detective searching for clues, tries to fuse the ideal painting in her mind with real phenomena, and uses new methods to infuse the forms and appearances in her paintings with vitality, which has enabled her to find the true meaning of learning from nature.
 

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