Ela Elizabeth Hsu

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

Ela Hsu’s practice emerges from years of lived experience and an evolving understanding of society and human nature. After many years working across engineering, architecture, and interior design, she stepped away from professional life and returned to school to pursue painting. What she found most precious in this transition was the freedom to experiment, to move beyond what she already knew, and to explore ways of making that she had never had the opportunity to experience before. Her current body of work reflects the first eighteen months of her painting practice, a period of active experimentation across different visual languages. Moving between abstraction and figuration, intuition and control, she uses colour, gesture, and material to explore different possibilities rather than settling too quickly into a fixed language. Through this process, she began to understand how many experiences she had carried with her that she had never been able to fully contain or articulate. Painting gradually became a place where these experiences could settle. She is drawn to creating a sense of quietness, not as an escape from fear or uncertainty, but as a way of giving them somewhere to exist. Within that quietness, she also seeks to preserve a sense of hope, however slight, as a way of continuing to believe in the world. The world contains too many grey areas to be easily defined, and perhaps for this reason, her paintings often move between two extremes: the deeply blurred and the...

Artwork