By Rita Chang

Bewilderment was the first impression I had when seeing Kuo Szumin's artworks for the first time. I had problem distinguishing the outside from the inside, the front from the back and the top from the bottom. However the metal sculptures resembling tied chains were solid and steady, they emitted the power of silence. They seemed bringing in messages from a distant universe through the remote past or an inexplicable future to the time being.

And my first impression of Szumin was "crystal". She has delicate features and naturally tranquil disposition, and her clear eyes showed how much she yearned for the knowledge of the unknown. I had hard time to picture she is the daughter of Prof. Lin Wen-Yueh, a writer and literary scholar I admire so much. Wouldn't the children of writers be more sophisticated? After knowing her better I feel Szumin's character is better represented by her art, stable but not stagnant, quiet but curious, not easy to understand but is very amicable.

These iron and stainless steel sculptures were welded in factory according to the artist's computer graphics. The following works include the artist's own painting, coloring, rusting or rust removal, scratching and polishing. Szumin usually started these tasks in the metal factory. Why a woman so fair and so tender would select such cold materials and bleak forms for her art? Except the geometric shapes, we find no other clue to know better about her art. The recent history of art flashed in my mind, I thought the structuralist artists must be closest to Szumin's world.

To answer my own questions, I overturned my bookshelves to search for theories about the structuralism dated back to the 1920s. Following cubism, structuralism asserted that art should be independent from visible things and should take shape through the abstract ideas in our mind. Art belongs to an invisible territory, but conforms to the laws of the universe. Many manifestos and essays have been written during this time to express the artists' ideas and ideals about art. Structuralist sculptor/poet/literary scholar Naum Gabo pointed out that artworks: "...have gone beyond the chaos of daily life and beyond the ash of the past to stand in front of the gate of the empty future." Structuralist artists proposed five principles for their art, they were:
1. No "color" but "hues".
2. No linear graphics but strength to form directions and dynamics of lines.
3. Volume doesn't matter but depth does.
4. The holding points, curves and surfaces structured in accordance with forces are the major concerns in sculpturing.
5. Creating kinetic rhythms instead of setting up fixed, dump sculptures.

Following these principles, structuralist artists were infatuated with the wonders of the structures they created, which have deeply influenced the spatiality of our world and approached our conscious. The legacy of structuralist artists gave us more substantial feelings about "spaces", bringing us closer to our experience of light and sounds.

Szumin's sculpture represents the aesthetics of structuralism, she captures "spaces" and, like a poetess highly sensitive to words, she never ceases to look into the possibilities of passing on abstract concepts through her art. Szumin uses metal-— inorganic materials-— to seize the spatial orders that we failed to see. Each facet of the metal implies a space, and each piece of the artist's sculpture suggests near ten facets and many spaces, depending on the audience's imagination. The abstract forms of hard metal have successfully enhanced the aesthetics of the materials.

Same to other structuralist artworks, techniques such as how the surfaces are presented don't affect the nature of the materials. Artists' touch such as Sscratching or polishing is the artist's minimizedal handling, but it decides the nature of the spaces it refers to. The spaces shaped by the tied chains are the results of forces or force fields, and the minimalist forms of the artist show her profound thoughts and inspirerelate us to concepts about physics such as "transcendence", "string", "relativity", "dimension" and "brane". The seemingly stable structures are actually created through many enhancing or counteracting forces happening to be connecting one other, which is why Szumin's sculptures are so intriguing. So many force fields constitute the spaces with tension, and when we are about to be thrown out from the three-dimensional space, we come to the gate of the forth dimension so we are able to peep into the graceful universe beyond, which is called by the artist as "Stone in Outer Space".

To me, Szumin's reticence and modesty are great virtue to an artist. She believes that the audience should be inspired by participating in art. She chooses abstract forms to provide more space room for the audience to imagine. The static, calm and profound "Stone in Outer Space" brings the audience beyond space but lands at the constant. I am more curious about what will be the artist's next step: Will her art maintain such tranquility and peace that seldom seen in the rebirth of art? How the artist is going to face herself during the rebirth? I suppose that's the reason why all the audience would like to follow the artist's journey with me.