Hsiao Chin
(Shanghai 1935)

Hsiao Chin was born in 1935 in Shanghai and in 1949 he moved to Taiwan, fleeing from the Chinese Cultural Revolution. From 1951 to 1954 he attended the Department of Fine Arts at he Provincial High School in Taipei; in 1952 he began to study modern art and in 1956, with other Chinese artists, he founded the Ton-Fan group. Winning a scholarship, he travelled to Madrid and later to Barcelona, where he spent three years around the major exponents of the Spanish Informal style: Tàpies, Saura, Cuixart, Feito. He wrote essays on the art of the Western Avant Garde, and took part in the Salón de Mayo in Barcelona (at the time, the foremost Avant Garde exhibition), initiating working relationships with the biggest galleries in the city. In 1958 he visited Italy for the first time, stopping in Venice, Florence (where he had a personal show in ’59), Rome and Milan, where he eventually moved. There he had contact with Fontana, Manzoni, Castellani and Crippa.

In 1961 he founded the Punto international artistic movement, with Italian, Japanese, Spanish, German and Dutch artists, exhibiting in Italy, Taipei, Barcelona, Rotterdam and Zurich. After a period in London, he lived in New York from 1966 to 1971, where he taught painting and drawing at Long Island University’s Southampton College, and had contact with Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. Between 1971 and 1972 he taught visual communication at Milan’s European Institute of Design. In the 1980s he returned to Shanghai where he gave lectures on international contemporary art. Back in Italy, he gave classes on artistic anatomy at the Fine Art University at Urbino, decoration at the Fine Art University of Turin, and from 1985 he taught copperplate engraving for ten years at the Brera Academy in Milan. There, in 1988, at the at the Studio Marconi, his first major anthological exhibition was held, displaying his work from 1958 to 1988. In 1996 there was an important retrospective of the artist at Taiwan’s Dimension Endowment of Art, with paintings, sculptures and graphic work from 1953 to 1996.

Hsiao Chin’s work can be found both in important private collections and in many public museums and art galleries: the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna in Roma; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; the Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong; the Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, Milan.