Reflections on Tsunshan — Art Critic Essays

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The theme of liberation in Tsunshan’s work focuses on shifting consciousness to explore the interaction of opposites within a broader reality that transcends them. His paintings aim to capture emotional depth without it dominating the image. Tsunshan combines personal feelings with the natural textures of his materials and strives to harmonize opposing elements. This is evident in his use of dripping colors, watery effects, and thoughtful color combinations or symbolic elements.

His compositions move away from conscious planning towards a more natural arrangement of elements. They reflect a calm depiction of his inner world, blending deep meanings with an awareness of cultural influences. Through his art, Tsunshan explores how personal truths and cultural symbols come together. His technique, particularly the use of water and oil, symbolically merges different aspects of life and cultural ideas, illustrating the complexity of reality.

Claudia Ricci, Art Critic and Curator, 1985 Italy

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Suddenly, everything is completely still: after the storm of lights follows an almost undisturbed darkness of the night—a fascinating spectacle between lighting up and fading away, emergence and decay. Tsunshan designs this transition not as an extreme switch but in shades of gray. One immediately discovers the Far Eastern elements in Tsunshan’s informal structures: a floating, lightened color scheme that the painter combines with elements of abstract Western art. However, this is not a calculated synthesis but a spontaneous confluence of different cultural influences.

Tsunshan’s art, however, differs from pure Action Painting: it is meditatively restrained, as if Pollock were moderated by Cy Twombly. The artist creates a synthesis typical of him, combining physical  painting action with intellectual structuring—thus also approaching the Buddhist unity of body and mind.

Kai Hoffmann, Art Critic, 1990 Germany

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Tsunshan’s art—the search is more for a path than a way leading to a specific goal, as this aesthetic experience can never be considered complete. Only constant questioning can expand our knowledge. This perspective changes the interpretations of a painting from one to another and even within the same work. Longer observation diversifies the meanings and places the interpretation on an intermediate level, which is neither too deep nor too superficial but lies in between, at the border where cultures meet and where there is no sense of attachment.

Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Art Critic and Curator, 1987 Italy

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What stands out about Tsunshan is his unique painting, which differs from international art trends. This comes from his determination and inner resources, despite his mild nature. The autonomy of his work has a marble-like quality. Western critical terms such as Tachism or Action Painting are unnecessary and misleading. His work shows oriental cultural characteristics and elements of the Chinese painting tradition.

Tsunshan blurs the boundary between figure and background, emphasizing the interplay of fullness and emptiness, light and shadow. This dynamic continuum connects man and world. His concentrated preparation leads to instinctive, automatic expression, often capturing fleeting impressions of man and the universe. His brushstrokes are varied and expressive, creating unique effects in each painting. Tsunshan’s work combines nature and artificiality, East and West, reflecting the paradox of Hong Kong, where ancient traditions meet high technology.

Giulio Ciavoliello, Art Critic, 1985 Italy

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Tsunshan’s painting accumulates layers of color, breaks down surfaces, decomposes the image, and reveals its shadow, its immeasurable depth, or dizzying heights. Tsunshan is a discreet artist. His work doesn’t shout or demand attention; it welcomes and gently transports the viewer, like a river flowing through a plain. The discretion here is refined. Refined is the play of light and darkness: the sudden illumination of a color or its abrupt fading into other tones reveals a skilled hand, balancing line and color with extreme precision.

The artist’s quest turns towards a contained lyricism entirely within the work itself, justified without recycled themes or imposed conceptualizations. Tsunshan moves with balance between a tight structure and a dreamy abandon along a path difficult to tread in our days.

Antonio Mercadante, Art Critic, 1985 Italy

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Tsunshan emphasizes that his paintings—in which brushstrokes, spots, and drips of color overlap and sometimes create the illusion of depth—are untitled because they are not meant to convey a ‘message’: the artist stands before the white canvas and lets the painting emerge without a predetermined goal.

Although this way of working recalls the concepts (and in a way the formal results) of abstract expressionism and gestural informalism, it shows an attitude that avoids verbal speculations and relies on concrete actions, typical of Eastern thinking between Taoism and Zen. What is important is solely what is seen, and what can be drawn from it (or not drawn: Tsunshan does not exclude indifference as a possibility of reception) is entirely left to personal sensitivity.

Jacopo Benci, Art Critic, 1987 Italy

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The intense effect of the colors in Tsunshan’s paintings arises from the tension fields of the contrasts between Eastern and Western cultural and painting traditions. Notably, there is an abolition of the genuine distinction between figures and background, similar to the most abstract Western painting. An important symbol, especially in the artist’s earlier works, is a gilded square, which here signifies life and death in one. The golden color holds an important position and is considered a sign of strength.

In the paintings, the various poles of existence—life and death, solid and liquid, lightness and heaviness, light and shadow—encounter each other. These opposing units alternate as the fundamental movement: color explosions, simple thick brushstrokes, diluted or concentrated painting—whether sprayed or dripped—and fine sweeping lines. Tsunshan’s painting technique involves an oil-acrylic mixed technique, where the colors can be ‘washed out’ at will by the pressure of a water jet. The paintings are made on unprimed or artist-thickened cotton canvases with white paint.

Cornelia Griesser-Bertram, Art Critic, 1990, Switzerland

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Tsunshan was born in Hong Kong, educated in England, has worked and exhibited in Italy, and now resides in Switzerland. Despite this international aura, he does not deny his Asian cultural background. His exhibition is a floral display of scents and colors—a strong contrast to the expressionism of the eighties. Here, one encounters a true envoy of Eastern mysteries and exoticism. The structureless universe of the paintings is poetic like the flow of water and the movements of the sky. There is not much to hold on to. If this exquisite aesthetic refinement is too much for a raw eighties soul, one cannot overlook Tsunshan's technical skills. He has a way with his washes and colors, making them blend into each other like perfumed clouds or branch out into filigree-like patterns. A well-placed stroke here and there can reveal the connection to tachist painting and the entire calligraphic tradition, which forms the basis for Tsunshan's refined hints and gradations on paper.

Peter Michael Hornung, Art Critic, 1986 Denmark

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The artist navigates through his own space with a slow and patient technique that allows the core of his creative process to settle in the mind and in the semantic structuring of the work, while keeping intact all the expressive vitality of the gesture in the gathering and solidification of signs on the canvas. On one hand, the work is captivating because it is enclosed in its own aestheticism, traceable to the ethics and tradition of the East; on the other hand, it is imbued with a sensual passion filtered through a crystalline purity of chromatic values.

Tsunshan manages to make his own, through the filtration of states of mind (feelings), the ecstatic contemplation of nature and humanity, typical of ancient Chinese painting, with the Western acquisition of the identification of symbolic and formal values of the sign. Calligraphy and painting are inseparably linked in Oriental aesthetics.

Here we do not witness the osmosis and mutual intertwining of cultures that have so inspired the artists of this century (consider, for example, Estienne’s tachisme, American action painting, or, stepping further back, Tobey’s white writings), but it is the idea, as a lived totality in anticipation of its fulfillment, that gives life to this lyrical abstraction.

Giuditta Villa, Art Critic, 1987 Italy

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Tsunshan is a magically impactful artist, with the ability to create swirling moods where everything is current, from losing oneself in the cascading flow of color to exploring the fecund characters of a pictoriality where Western modern synthesis blends with ancient Oriental symbolism.

Abstraction, therefore, serves as a human need to establish contact with the indeterminate, with the fertile chaos of totality, the beauty of a being confronting absence, the lack of references, in the sole company of light.

Francesco Gallo, Art Critic and Curator, 1986 Italy

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Tsunshan’s gossamer waterwash paintings almost took my breath away with their subdued and finely attuned dramatic force. It may sound like a contradiction to be both subdued and dramatically forceful. And maybe it is a contradiction. But when you come to Tsunshan’s pictures, these very contradictions are united in a great, beautiful, and ever-vibrant miracle.

In picture after picture, I recognized this ever-present nearness to a streaming, pregnant life. Against all empty constructions of square poverty and asceticism, he directs the warm, vibrant, and ever-trembling richness of life. That simple and overwhelmingly natural was the meeting with Tsunshan’s waterwash paintings in Copenhagen. At first, the sun had pierced the clouds and revealed the eternal and simple beauty of nature to me. After that, Tsunshan revealed through his pictures the necessity of forever listening to the mythical song that trembles in the human breast. What his pictures revealed to me was—or became—something holy that resembles love.

Stig Åke Stålnacke, Art Critic, 1986 Denmark

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Tsunshan, thanks to his natural mediation between two cultural universes, works with an approach where figuration is rigorously banned, in line with the latest research on abstraction pursued through Oriental methods and techniques. The tools he uses largely originate from China: the technique of diluting oil paint, applied with glazes and different layers akin to watercolor, allows the artist to conceive sensitive textures.

Tsunshan’s work aims at a synthesis of color, light, and gesture that gives shape to a painting which might otherwise risk falling into generic abstract impressionism. Gesture represents the synthetic, organizing intervention capable of defining and concluding the composition in a definitive form. In Oriental painting, the subject has never held excessive importance; what has always interested Oriental artists is sensitivity towards line, color, and the internal logic of an immutable, timeless creative philosophy, which finds fertile ground in art for the experimentation of ideas and spirit. Tsunshan does not deviate from these creative principles; while aware of the various and diverse propositions of Western contemporary art, he pursues a path that respects these Oriental cultural roots. It is also true that Tsunshan’s painting does not shy away from combining these two distant visual cultures, which have had various interactions since Impressionism onward.

Giulio Alessandri, Art Critic, 1985 Italy

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A spontaneous branching of color on the canvas, an informal texture of magmatic spill and dripping fall. An uncontrolled explosion of vitality. Color becomes a veil of light that contrasts, spreads, diffuses, with a voluptuous genesis of random forms, like black winter clouds that have captured a rebellious ray of sunshine. Thus Tsunshan fills the candid canvas with spots, making it sweat with polychrome mood, yet also making it transpire like an indecipherable discourse, like emotion searching for itself, as trial and retrial, as a path yet to be traced.

In contrast, there is the paper with the ideogram, the cultural relic, the ornate sign of communication, almost like a symbol of death. It is a geometric presence that tends to contain emotional gesturality, giving it memory, a sense of time. Wandering has begun and it is uncertain whether it will have solid wings of Daedalus or treacherous wax of Icarus. We can observe the turning of its desire, the eruption of its fragile passion, the awakening of infatuation in the chaos of the beginning, like mute witnesses of the event.

Francesco Gallo, Art Critic and Curator, 1984 Italy

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Tsunshan explores incessantly and simultaneously ventures into a fascinating painterly world. His painting is fluid, manifesting through continuous overlapping, splashes, fillings, veils, and jets of color. This work proves to be extremely captivating, combining reflective method with instinctive impulses. Tsunshan’s water painting often seems to overlay different screens, creating a fluid fabric of layers that solidify the flowing liquid. His works play with contrasts between precious materials like delicately positioned gold leaf on liquid surfaces, floating on a river of changing and brilliant reflections.

Tsunshan appears to desire to paint directly on air, on water, on invisible supports, to focus attention on color itself. The color becomes the protagonist, an autonomous and significant presence, refined and lyrical, now dark and looming. Tsunshan’s painting speaks its original language, tending to expand and occupy the entire visual field of the viewer, like an ocean of transparencies and the violence of waves. His work seems to seek its essence in something invisible, which is visible only through his colors, brought to life by a philosophy of absence.

Tsunshan has chosen to orient his research between the language of painting and things, but privileging painting itself and the perception of non-objectivity. His process emphasizes the analytical gesture of painting, almost making the hand disappear to focus attention on the pictorial language independently of the artist’s intentions. The canvas thus becomes the natural place for the genesis of pictorial language, not a screen for intentional projections, but a primary and authentic place of expression.

Francesca Alfano Miglietti, Art Critic and Curator, 1988 Italy

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Every gesture corresponds to a sound. Rapid brushstrokes emerge from a finely crafted musical fabric. There is the flavor of European informality, yet the fragrance of the Orient permeates. Colors love and hate each other, fiercely collide, degrade, transform. Well-controlled chemical reactions invent implosive chromatisms, where light can penetrate or fall onto the surface with greater or lesser intensity, depending on the processed material. And then there is the paper, as a relic, as a testimony. Tsunshan discovers a memory in the gesture, where the discreet charm of a human culture reconciles with the aesthetic product.

Art enters life more than a sharp blade or a brush that tears through the silence or buzz of time with color. And in that color, on warmth, lie the origins of Fate. From there, time took its first steps. Previously, only the anticipation of the event reigned; but from the sum of fillings originated from a pictorial archetype, the image of the nascent takes shape. The seed of man will give rise to the deceit of art, but it will always be matter consumed by the sun.

Enzo Battarra, Art Critic and Curator, 1983 Italy

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Tsunshan’s art is not for art lovers seeking the effect and open statement within a single image. While he consciously employs the power of dominant, strong colors (gray, red, blue, white) on both large and small formats, the most striking features of his paintings are those mysterious linear structures, reminiscent of Chinese characters in their rudimentary form. His color fields possess life, exhibiting a simple and calm expression of their color fire.

Here, Tsunshan seems intent on juxtaposing form—the primordial form, so to speak—against restlessness. Opinions diverge in front of his delicate color panels: those who can feel, let them feel. In these untitled paintings, there is an aura that transcends the purely aesthetic and approaches the statement rooted in Chinese Tao: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth...”

Tsunshan also affirms the Chinese brushstroke technique, a concern shared by Master Li-ChuSen (in Formosa), aiming to synthesize Chinese painting traditions with Western expressive means, akin to artists like Kumi Sugai. One often encounters Far Eastern cultural elements in Tsunshan’s works, yet they are unified within a completely contemporary dimension. “I also try to incorporate symbols like fire, water, earth, and air into my paintings,” says Tsunshan, whose art speaks of the cosmos and the energy of creation.

Jacqueline Trachsel, Art Critic, 1991 Switzerland

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Time slipped through the years of sinners, leaving a faint mark. It was a whisper, but the heart beat faster and color dripped onto the canvas. The work was traversed by a tremor of astonishment, then fell silent, contemplating tomorrow. "Its upper part is not dazzling, its lower part is not dark": these are verses by Tsunshan himself. They seem to outline the essential elements of his painting, played on dualisms and refined balances. Matter and form, oil and water, canvas and paper oppose each other and together narrate entire stories of ancient ancestors lost in the distant East and youthful furors exploded in the new Western world.

Cerebral mirages of pure color scripts blend in a volcanic desert, where every encounter is a clash and truth always has two faces. A sparkling thread of Ariadne infused with transcendent philosophy winds through gestural labyrinths. Jumping from one extreme to another in life, Tsunshan’s painterly impulse dives into reflective pauses, where the sweetest memories emerge.

In his solo exhibition at Spazio Uno, the seven displayed canvases—square, rigorous yet extremely free (as the heads of the Seven Sages might have been)—marked the rhythm of a musical score immersed in a deconstructed time. The fable dissolved into the subtlest and most varied weaves, transforming into an intricate vital fabric. Tsunshan revealed how color can encounter itself in new forms. The sage confirms that pictorial matter is versatile and docile, but also evanescent and elusive: it all lies in harmonizing the parts of discourse and making them dialogue as far as possible, and even a bit beyond.

Enzo Battarra, Art Critic and Curator, 1983 Italy

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The paintings derive their impact from the tension between contrasts, from Western and Eastern cultural and painting traditions, from the symbol of the interplay of Yin and Yang. But even without knowledge of “Tao,” the universal principle of things, the unchanging law of reality according to ancient Chinese sages, the observer feels the symbols of life in the exploding clouds of color and rediscovers a spiritual order behind formlessness.

Tsunshan works with ink, oil, and tempera, often using a mixed technique. He contrasts transparent, tone-on-tone color fields with bold brushstrokes of deep red or black. The paintings are untitled, allowing for various interpretations, which adds to their allure. Against a dark blue background, delicately grayish-pink gas clouds rise. Golden dots of all sizes form chains of stars, suns glow—the universe lives its order out of chaos. Perhaps the next viewer sees an outburst of emotion, a nocturnal experience, or a dream in the painting? Often, the gilded square, a symbol of death in Chinese tradition, appears in the works. For the artist, death and life are intertwined.

Helga Rölke, Art Critic, 1989 Switzerland

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Bare your soul, open your eyes, and immerse your iris in Tsunshan’s painterly adventures. They are nothing because they are everything—except for the beautiful stamp signature and the golden square symbol of life and death, which are transformed into mist, bubbles, and dots in a thousand colors. Feast your eyes and drift away from the apparent reality of things into a poetic cosmos, a nirvana where physical realities dissolve into floating, fragrant clouds of color. Here, the created and the imagined, the seen and the unseen, achieve equality.

This is how the cosmic poet Tsunshan paints—seductively, captivatingly unreal—conveying both everything and nothing through his art. These gentle, poetic Buddhist fireworks represent only what you perceive in them: portraits of the soul and reflections of the universe, long before any god considered creation. Everything is at your will, and pleasure will be the first reaction of many.

Bad din iris, 1986 Denmark

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“Countless times I have been asked about the meaning and message of my paintings; my answer is always beneath the painting: Untitled,” explains Tsunshan. Critics describe his art as a “suggestive universe,” as “art that speaks of the cosmos and the idea of creation,” as “visions of sensitivity.” Art historian Hinterthür writes on the topic of “Modern Chinese Art from Hong Kong”: “It is a successful synthesis of Eastern-meditative philosophy and Western-expressionistic materialism.” The key to Tsunshan’s work lies primarily in the “non-existent” title of his paintings: Untitled. In Chinese Tao, it is said: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the origin of heaven and earth.

Paolo Bianchi, Art Critic and Curator, 1989 Switzerland

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Tsunshan’s scenic machine is configured as a strange blend of Eastern tradition and Western experimentalism, resulting in a series of symbolic escapes stemming from the natural inconsistencies that arise. These inconsistencies are essentially of a mental nature, involving a true psychology of art, an autonomous psychology that, however, is not independent from that of the artist who wrestles in the gestation of formless harmonious fury.

Francesco Gallo, Art Critic, 1988 Italy

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Tsunshan says that only those who get lost can be saved; his paintings cause the viewer to lose themselves in a captivating universe, allowing them to experience the aesthetic spaces within his magically structured environments.

Francesca Alfano Miglietti, Art Critic, 1985 Italy