PAN HSINHUA 潘信華
Qualia Contemporary Art
229 Hamilton Ave
Palo Alto, CA 94301
info@qualiagallery.com www.qualiagallery.com
PAN HSINHUA 潘信華
Pan Hsin-Hua builds visual atlases that collapse time and perspective, crafting a Taiwanese retrofuturism within each painting. His paintings look like artifacts or maps from an unknown time, blending historical references and contemporary sensibilities through inventive, pseudoarchaic technique. What looks ancient at first glance resists temporal assignment, resulting in paintings that negotiate between heritage and modernity.
Abandoning literati line, brush display, and the orthodoxy of xuan paper, Pan homages both Gongbi (Meticulous painting) and Thangka (Tibetan-Buddhist painting) while developing a technique that broadens the tonal and textural vocabulary of the medium. Pan works on aged mulberry or hemp paper, coating, soaping, and layering washes to mimic weathered temple walls. Powdered mineral pigments in vibrant shades mixed with animal glue yield an opaque finish and a limited color palette. He builds flattened, washed compositions and eliminates linear perspective and hierarchy between subjects.
“My style falls at a midpoint between traditional and contemporary culture,” he says. “This is why I choose these colors, lines, and the techniques of the Yuan dynasty. I especially like Qian Xuan, Zhao Mengfu, and Chen Hongshou—artists who reinterpreted the past to express dissatisfaction with their own times.” - Pan Hsinhua
PAN HSINHUA 潘信華
In Pan’s painted worlds, he often includes small human figures: children posed as prematurely world-weary adults. The child, mimicking adult posture with serious composure, represents associations with traditional imagery or poetic allusions, yet at the same time is drawn to seem strangely out of place. The anachronistic figure coexists with ancient and modern artifacts: religious and folk symbols, natural Taiwanese flora and fauna, architecture, meridians, mythical creatures, and butterflies, all integrated without hierarchy.
Pan argues that not every object must maintain logical nor symbolic coherence:
“My work has that sense of being fantastic and surreal. But there is nothing symbolic about the things you see. I want the work to be fun, sarcastic at times. I place the children as they are because they can exist in any time period. Their clothes are simple, their behavior natural, so they fit into the environment. The surface leans toward tradition but it’s really a fantastic, distracted world related to the contemporary. The stability that traditional art offers us is gone. The world is suddenly distorted, and I want to make a fantastic space far from what people imagine as an ideal landscape.”
To truly innovate requires a longstanding relationship with form, history, material, and medium, to straddle the past and future. By refusing both nostalgia and allegory, Pan’s practice honors Chinese painting, but does not continue tradition. Rather, he creates a Taiwanese retrofuturism: reshaping his visual language into a world that is unexplored yet familiar.
Installation View: Pan Hsinhua: Phenomena of Qi (Open Oct 25 – Dec 6, 2025)
Mixed pigment on paper
110x60 cm | 43 1/4 x 23 5/8 in
觀花蝶 Viewing Flower and Butterfly, 2023
秋郊賞花圖 An Autumn Outing Among the Flowers, 2023
Mixed pigment on paper
Diameter: 128 cm | 50 3/8 in
Installation View: Pan Hsinhua: Phenomena of Qi (Open Oct 25 – Dec 6, 2025)
溪岸送別 Parting by the Riverside, 2025
Mixed pigment on paper
175x82cm | 68 7/8 x 32 1/4 in
群山淡景 Hazy Mountainscape, 2020
Mixed pigment on paper
73x133cm | 28 3/4 x 52 3/8 in
Mixed pigment on paper
200 x 125cm | 78 3/4 x 49 1/4 in
綠色大地 Green Land, 2020
Installation View: Pan Hsinhua: Phenomena of Qi (Open Oct 25 – Dec 6, 2025)
面痣圖男 Map of a Man’s Moles, 2023
Mixed pigment on paper
84x50 cm | 33 1/8 x 19 3/4 in
梅枝盆景圖 Plum Branch Miniature Garden, 2023
Mixed pigment on paper
132x83 cm | 52 x 32 5/8 in
Installation View: Pan Hsinhua: Phenomena of Qi (Open Oct 25 – Dec 6, 2025)
懸絲診脈 Suspended Thread Pulse Reading, 2023
Mixed pigment on paper
Diameter: 92 cm | 36 1/4 in
醬果處處 Where the Berries Grow, 2025
Mixed pigment on paper
78x140cm | 30 3/4 x 55 1/8 in
Installation View: Pan Hsinhua: Phenomena of Qi (Open Oct 25 – Dec 6, 2025)
審氣圖 Reading the Breath, 2025
Mixed pigment on paper
72x122cm | 28 3/8 x 48 in
手太陰肺經圖 Map of the Lung Meridian, 2025
Mixed pigment on paper
176x89 cm | 69 1/4 x 35 in
手太陰心經圖 Map of the Heart Meridian, 2025
Mixed pigment on paper
176x89 cm | 69 1/4 x 35 in
Installation View: Pan Hsinhua: Phenomena of Qi (Open Oct 25 – Dec 6, 2025)
明月夜 Moonlit Night, 2023
Mixed pigment on paper
Diameter: 140 cm | 55 in
練氣圖 Practicing the Breath, 2025
Mixed pigment on paper
75x168cm | 29 1/2 x 66 1/8 in
72 x 122 cm | 28 3/8 x 48 in
見龍在田 Dragon in the Field, 2024
Mixed pigment on paper
PAN HSINHUA 潘信華
b.1966 in Taitung, Taiwan; lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan
Pan Hsinhua graduated in 1991 from the Taipei National University of the Arts with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art and held a teaching position there as an assistant professor from 2011 to 2015. He is currently living and working in Taipei, Taiwan. Celebrated for his unique artistic language, Pan Hsinhua creates surrealistic paintings in the classical Chinese brush-and-ink style. He skillfully blends both the past and the present in his artworks, examining the relevance of tradition in contemporary culture.
Pan has exhibited at Taiwan Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan in 2020 and Chengdu Biennale, Chengdu, China in 2013. He has held numerous solo exhibitions in major museums and institutions in Taiwan such as Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; Life Science Library, Academia Sinica, Taipei; National Central University Art Center, Taoyuan; Accton Arts Foundation, Hsinchu; Art Center of Providence University, Taichung; and in Asia Arts Center, Beijing, China; among others. He was also featured in notable group exhibitions in Taiwan including Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei; National Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, Taipei; Hong-gah Museum, Taipei; Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung; Hengshan Calligraphy Art Center, Taoyuan; and internationally at Yinchuan MOCA, Yinchuan, China; Mitsuo Aida Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Saatchi Gallery, London, England; Canberra Museum & Gallery, Canberra, Australia; Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane, Australia; and Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, New York, USA.
His works are in the collections of several institutions in Taiwan including the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung; and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung.