Wen Hsu (self-portrait, left) is an artist of Chinese heritage who lives in Costa Rica, a country filled with enchanted, dramatic landscapes and magical stories. She originally trained as an architect and worked in the field for several years before deciding to pursue her childhood dream of drawing and painting stories. Like a fairy tale heroine, she left everything and everyone behind and set off to seek her fortune, traveling to America to study art at the acclaimed Rhode Island School of Design. "It was there," she says, "that I got the foundation needed to express the characters and stories in my head."
Wen has been fascinated by folklore and mythology ever since she can remember. "Living in the tropics, close by the Rain Forest, has always spurred my imagination. I have a childhood obsession with Greek myth, but my main influences are Asian and Latin American. Lately I've been interested in mythic archetypes and how they match and differ between different cultures and different mythologies around the world." Much of Wen's work is rooted in the myths and symbols of women's spirituality. The painting on the above-right, for example, is a Horned Goddess figure inspired by Meso-American art and a trip to Guatemala. The two images at the bottom of this post are The Empress and The Priestess, powerful female figures in the Tarot.
"This is Xi He," Wen says about the painting on the left. "In Chinese legend, she was the Mother of Ten Suns, one for each day of the week. Every day she would bathe them in a lake, wrap them up and place them on a mulberry tree. She would then send out one sun per day...until one day the suns grew bored and felt mischievous, so they took a journey over the earth together, scourging it. Then they were all shot down, all but one...but that's another story....
"As an illustrator I draw my inspiration from everything and anything, but perhaps most from the fact that I was born into a Chinese family and raised in Costa Rica. My work reflects the amalgam of these beautiful cultures, as well as a genuine openness to other ethical world visions and my deep appreciation for Nature, which comes effortlessly when one lives surrounded by such an exuberant environment."
To see more of Wen Hsu's art, visit her illustration website, and the deviantArt website where she exhibits under the name neshad. To learn more about the folk tales of Costa Rica, read "When My Hair Was Woven With Duendes" by Taiko Haessler, in the Endicott archives.
Awesome. I've been following (and admiring) her artistic progress @ devArt and am delighted to see a feature on her here.
Posted by: Nin Harris | February 06, 2007 at 05:25 AM