After his major exhibition at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014, and followed by an absence of 3 years, Hsi Shih-Pin is now back with “Hsi Shih-Pin．Invisible Stars of the Hydra”, a grand solo exhibition launched by Soka Art Center Taipei for the ART TAIPEI international fair.

As a lover of myths and a good storyteller, Hsi Shih-Pin imbues all of his works with mesmerizing stories. Each of his exhibitions is a theater of vision and imagination chained together by an existing text and the artist’s fictional plot. “Invisible Stars of the Hydra” is composed by three brand new pieces, which tell a sad love story about an invisible star inside the Hydra constellation.

As the artist’s ideal prototype, “the horse” represents an endless pursuit.  This year marks the 13th year of him summoning horses, as well as the 6th year for calling on winged horses. “Winged Horse – Boundless 009” serves both as the opening and closing of this exhibition. In Hsi Shih-Pin’s story, the image of a winged horse comes from Pegasus, the most beautiful flying horse in the world according to Greek mythology. With a superior pair of wings, it was the child of Poseidon and Medusa. However, the artist was not satisfied with giving his flying horse a pair of beautiful wings. As a result, he alters it by adding antlers and a lion’s tail, which better reveal an ideal prototype in a perpetual state of self-evolution. Accidently seeing a Dunhuang brick depicting a heavenly horse with a scarf flowing around its neck, Hsi Shih-Pin drew a suspended comma for this winged horse. Whether creating a hybrid shape, or taking the name of his work from the manga “Cyborg 009” by Japanese mangaka Shotaro Ishinomori, the artist integrated into the sculpture the DNA of creation, which was drawn from extensive readings of Eastern and Western myths, literature, comics.

Hsi Shih-Pin’s fictional stories do not just include Pegasus, but also the great hero Hercules. Symbolizing power, this demigod had to fight the Nemean lion, bred by the Goddess Hera. After defeating the lion, the hero cut off its head to make a helmet and skinned the pelt for armor. Combined together, they made him invulnerable, like the male lion in the artist’s work, which appears as a gladiator, proudly standing on a star-shaped castle. In the artist’s story, the hero bends his knees to love, hatching a phoenix, which becomes the symbol of a transiently extreme happiness within the state of “completeness” of this work: a coexistence between perfection and imperfection, beauty and deformity.  Just like the immortal bird burning itself to death every 500 years, supreme joy occurs in the moment life overlaps death.

We are familiar with the vocabulary shaped within Hsi Shih-Pin’s works. Overlapping, misplacing, or disassembling his memories, imaginations, and external reality, the artist uses shiny and sharp metals to gather complex geometric figures, removing their original meaning. Such tailored stitching, where meaningful and meaningless are mixed, is what he calls “memory”. “Hsi Shih-Pin．Invisible Stars of the Hydra” untangles the creative context of the artist over the past 10 years, while the fictional mythological texts he wrote for the exhibition are interlaced into the “misreadings” deliberately created by the three works, storming into the multiple meanings of memory.  The artist believes that “sculpture is an extremely realistic creative practice, since it naturally summons things that are unrealistic, non-existent, and transcend imagination”.