Chen Ching-Hsiu – Exploring the Context of "Chili Powder"

Text / Chen Chi-Hsiang

Preface: Chen Ching-Hsiu’s work is alternative and original, using unusual materials and media. Her works are unique and feminine, representing a purely female soft writing style, making her the only artist in Taiwan deeply exploring olfactory sensory art. Her creations revolve around women’s sensitive, delicate, poetic, and bodily intuition, expressing emotion and material energy through material signs, references, metaphors, and allegories. This reflects feminist soft power and consciousness, exploring a desire to return to inner essence. She uses these visual, aromatic, and flavorful material ingenuities to construct her perceptual world, transcending traditional aesthetics to form a symphony of visual, tactile, and olfactory resonance. Especially the strong, pungent red chili powder or exotic curry powder startles the audience’s sensitive taste and smell, shaking their senses until they sneeze and tear up. This visually appetizing sculptural art directly challenges people’s perception and consciousness between vision and smell, senses and energy, nature and humanities, physics and psychology, matter and spirit.

The Red Countenance and Signs of Active Chili Powder: Ching-Hsiu keenly identifies the consciousness and awareness of materials existing in daily life, transforming and internalizing them into the "Dao" of color, scent, and flavor. Through organic active substances, naturally released odors stimulate strong sensory awareness in the body. As time and space humidity evolve naturally (fermentation and molding), within this veil of mysterious experience, filled with magic and imagination, material energy erupts, metaphorically illustrating the rise and fall of life and explaining natural phenomena. Chili powder is an external and internal reflection of Ching-Hsiu as a woman; its bright red hue resembles women’s magnificence and gentleness, but also refers to the fiery personality hidden deep in women’s hearts, indicating traits of beauty and sorrow. The red countenance of chili powder becomes a metaphor for women. Bright red is the color of joy and celebration in folk weddings and solemn religious ceremonies, alluding to the boiling blood and bloody violence within the body. The vibrant red chili powder illustrates material energy and visual tension, being both sexy, warm, tender, sensual, and fiery, highlighting the material vocabulary of unique female consciousness, full of feminine writing imagery and character.

Exploring the Context of "Chili Powder": Ching-Hsiu stimulated the body’s strong sensory response to chili powder, appearing in the 2004 spring roll skin and chili powder installation Dancing Empty Assembly, where red powder drifted down from the warehouse beams, dancing with the slow stirring of air, releasing a strong, pungently spicy energy that teased people’s senses. In 2008, directly challenging people’s senses in The Dao of Smell: the color, scent, and flavor of chili powder were liberated in Special Blend Sage Cuisine, Master Your Mind. Pieces of white dough floated on red chili powder, and in At the Beginning of Man, arranged in a row on a rectangular patch of red chili powder to spell out "At the Beginning of Man," with red and white text and odor becoming the work’s signs.

After At the Beginning of Man, Ching-Hsiu’s environmental work Flavor (2008) took shape as a chili powder spatial installation—two pieces, rectangular and circular. Fresh red powder was directly laid on the ground. The rectangular piece had the large characters "Flavor" written on it, and the word "Flavor" was sprayed onto the wall in a tautological manner. The circular piece had the four characters "Flavor" written crosswise. Under conceptual textual reference and geometric forms, the pungent, fiery odor filled the entire air, directly stimulating the audience’s physical senses, enthusiastically causing continuous sneezing and tears, inducing strong physical and mental resonance. It illustrates Tension in the Energy Field, completely breaking away from traditional visual aesthetic experiences, entering the physical and mental field, presenting the existential meaning of "energy transformation and decay." The artist said: "Investigating the energy field is actually an internal cognitive path to understanding the intrinsic relationship between life phenomena and natural interaction."

Co-constructed Active Paintings of Time with "Chili Powder": As time and life grow, moving from passion and boldness to restraint and even dormancy, she placed vibrant, active red chili powder directly inside acrylic glass frames to form vertical paintings Chili Red (a series of three, 2013). Poetic and artistic, full of imagery resembling natural landscape scenery, pure, warm, and elegant, expressing a ladylike temperament, blending between nature and humanities. Similarly, after several months of natural transformation, the same group of works Chili Red surprisingly became The Story of Chili Powder and Mold—All in Silence. The organic medium, chili powder, continued to ferment in humid air, with fine white mold spots adhering to the glass, growing from the outside inward. In the dialogue of time, everything was left unsaid, an unexpected and wondrous landscape witnessing traces of time. Two years later, the powder clumped due to moisture, with active white mold colonies covering the surface. The vibrant red ripened into dark brownish-red, resembling a forest ecosystem. That natural beauty was unimaginable in Cross-Space-Time Dialogue Between Chili Powder and Mold (a series of six, 2013–15). However, severe mold colony fragmentation and structural effects caused by exhibition transport vibrations formed another type of natural geography or environmental ecological landscape. Ching-Hsiu treats time as the alchemy of matter, transforming it into alternative forms, energy, and texture, becoming extraordinary and magical active paintings, far exceeding all traditional types.

March 2016, at Zhuluo Mountain