Shao-Feng Hsu | Between Low Tide and New Moon

When we are born, there's this thing that we keep doing, 
—without knowing what we are doing—which is breathe. 
Not until we get into the water do we start having awareness of it, 
and we have to change the way we breathe.

As a child Shao-Feng Hsu began swimming to combat severe asthma by strengthening his respiratory system. When he wasn’t practicing, he sat at the bottom of the pool holding his breath, and then released, watching the bubbles float to the surface. With Night Swimming Hsu evokes this childhood meditation on breath, creating one-of-a-kind images on the darkest night of the month, the new moon. Sitting under the water in a pool, the artist breathes out, and with a flash, exposes his breath to light sensitive photo paper that is floating on the surface. The resulting images are both as similar and different as each breath is, made visible in the pattern they make on the paper. 

Made simultaneously, Coastal Access, is a series of photographic images made on the coast of California. The images of tide pools, kelp, the water bubbles that stick to the ends of one’s fingers when a stroke moves steadily through the water, are an exploration of the artist’s current home. Spending time on coastlines is not new for the artist. Hsu’s home—Taiwan—is surrounded by the same Pacific Ocean that he free dives in here in California. Exploring the Pacific Ocean connects his current home to the one he grew up in.

There is an oceanic mindset versus a terrestrial one. 
For people who grow up on the island, the water is the road. 
Once I step in the water, I'm connected to the other. 

Hsu’s work comes from deep observation and experience: an immersion in photography and a lifetime in the water. His understanding of the materiality and properties of both give us images that encapsulate the magic in each. Both bodies of work speak to the ecotone, the space between two biological communities: between water and air, land and sea, between our bodies and the environment, and between ourselves and the people and places we long to be near.