Features - November 10, 2007
Margaret Agusta, Contributor, Jakarta
Large frameless canvases filled with carefully framed color fields dominated by grey, black, and white, with only occasional hints of a wider rainbow of muted hues amid both figurative and abstract forms. What do they mean, and what do they say?

In his current exhibition at Cemara 6 Gallery, Hansen Thiam Sun speaks of the myriad dichotomies of life and human existence.

Hansen, who was born in Toho, West Kalimantan, and studied art and technical design both in Indonesia and America before embarking on a career as a yacht designer in the United States before he returned to Bandung, West Java, and eventually settled in Ubud on the island of gods and artists, knows well of what he speaks.

Hansen, has consistently attempted to measure and define what is "east" and what is "west" throughout his experiences as a painter that began in his childhood with training in Chinese calligraphy and were stimulated dramatically when he encountered a wider range of art theory and practice as an adult during his time in America.

In this current exhibition of paintings that defy easy classification or definition within the narrow confines of terms like "abstract expressionism" and "minimalism" he walks the viewer through the minefield of contradictions of contemporary existence in a world that technological advances have shrunk to the state that east and west overlap and at times collide.

Hansen once commented in relation to an earlier exhibition that he is seeking a way through which "east and west will meet in one current". In this exhibition, ongoing through Nov. 15, Hansen offers canvases layered not only with various colors and tones of paint, but with pieces of cardboard and cheesecloth, and images as diverse as wine bottles and light bulbs, along with calligraphic swirls and squiggles that dance like wayang figures or ancient dragons across the visual fields, while pinpointing and defining particular segments of the individual works.

Hansen's large unframed works are like paintings within paintings. The presence of the main color fields, which usually dominate the center or top or bottom of the canvases with muted, neutral tones of grey or beige, are sharply curtailed by heavy black color plains.

This approach clearly divides the canvases into two distinct areas of dialogue. The smooth, flat black areas form a backdrop for starkly defined, clearly identifiable images of manufactured objects familiar to modern man, such as electrical cables and cords and light bulbs. In contrast, the grey sections are teeming with texture created not only by plastered on cheesecloth or corrugated cardboard, but also from layer upon layer of paint, with various muted tones peeking through gaps left by overlying brushstrokes or the gouges of sharp objects into the top surface of paint. Over the top of all this is splashed the calligraphy that is neither letters nor words nor discernible figures.

In works like the numbered series titled Unconnected, the inner spiritual world of the human psyche or soul shimmers with incandescence in the upper, center grey field, while the cables and the light bulbs popping white out of the upper and lower black color fields illuminate little more than their purpose as tools of the material world.

The companion pieces Before Supper and After Supper take Hansen's focus on dichotomy a step further as he references the world's major religions and their interpretations and redefining over time as human beings have journeyed from a world full of metaphysical import into one of technological complexity that has reshaped our outer world and, perhaps, constrained our inner being.

In Hansen's works, east and west, spiritual and rational, old and new, yesterday and tomorrow reach out of the canvasses to ask us who we are, how we define ourselves and how we individually comprehend the shape and form of the natural and human worlds in which mankind currently exists.

He also continues to ask of himself and the viewers of his works -- seeming at times to despair of a positive answer -- whether east and west will ever fully blend and merge.

If this exhibition offers any clue at all, it may be that in Hansen's mind this meld has actually already begun, and that the only sure way east and west will ever truly meet is in individual human minds.