Peter Hsu

I don’t know where my interest in murmurations, or mass flocking of birds, came from, but when it came I couldn’t ignore it. One morning, I woke and suddenly flocks of birds filled my mind, wheeling into my consciousness as if they had always been a focal point of my mental landscape. They chased other thoughts away and I pondered them, watching them wheel and careen across the sky behind my eyes. I saw them become lines, avatars of pure change, direction given form and I knew that I wanted to immortalise that motion the best way I knew how, so I reached for pen and paper. My practice has been utterly transformed since then, focusing increasingly on representing abstract Daoist concepts through works inspired by natural forces like murmurations that seem to hint at universal forces

A myriad of interesting concepts and tensions have arisen from my initial attempts to capture the feeling of mumurations of birds and schools of fish with ink on paper. Early on, I wanted to capture the energy of directed chaos, the speed of seemingly spontaneous response that ripples through a flock as they twist and turn. I drew and painted my murmurations as literal birds, attempting to at least somewhat represent their forms. As time has gone on, I have moved away from a strict attempt to represent them and I am focused more and more on the inherent characteristics of mark making, the particular relationships between the tool, the medium, and the ground. I work primarily with brush and ink, a medium that has a storied relationship with Chinese arts and was also integral to the independent comics and manga of the 70s, 80s, and 90s that deeply influenced my aesthetics and mark making techniques. While I occasionally use color, I am continually drawn to work mostly with black and white, using these two colors like yin and yang to express the myriad of things.