Hu Kun-jung was born in San-chung, Taipei in 1955. Hu graduated from a military high school and served as a technician in the Bureau of Engineering Corps for six years. After completing his career in the military, Hu passed the exam and entered the night division of National Academy of Fine Arts. While studying in the academy, Hu was inspired by the artist Chen Shi-ming. Through mass readings and practices, Hu eventually figured out his own direction in art creation which took up abstraction and geometric graphics in art. In the 1980s, Hu made more contact with Richard Lin and other artists who had a similar interest in art and further confirmed his choice of geometrical figuration as his main focus as well as his self-consciousness in artistic creativity. In 1990, when his artistic creativity had come to its maturation, Hu went to Paris to experience life and art and to focus on his own creativity. A decade of life and artistic exploration in Paris did not change Hu’s fundamental artistic concern for art. After returning from Paris, Hu recreated a finer and more abundant visual possibility in his personalized geometrical abstract style.

8 Over 8 is composed by 8 pieces of rectangular canvas in different sizes and lengths. The length of the combination of 8 Over 8 is over 6-meter long. Though the arrangement of the pure color chunks does not feature a visual focus, viewers’ vision would follow the guidance of the paralleled vertical color figures and shift their vision horizontally. The visual fluidity and sense of time thus originate from the visual expectation. The figuration and color elements together generate dynamics and spatiality—either rapid or mitigate, sometimes high and sometimes low. The artwork brings about the rhythmic musical imagination to one’s mind with visual mentality. Oftentimes viewers would react to his work through the simplistic composition and design at their first sight. Nevertheless, Hu Kun-jung once commented that he never drafts his tableau before putting his work together. Most of the time, it depends on his simultaneous response and improvisation in his artistic creativity. Hu’s simultaneous response and improvisation is closer to the sensational guiding power that leads to one’s sentiment. Perhaps, the harmony and tension structured under the dialectics between sense and sensibility would point to a new way for viewers to come closer to the core of Hu Kun-jung’s creativity.

The break of the shackled Taiwan political system and social taboos and the improvement of economics in the 1980s had brought about a diversified and complex dimension to Taiwan art scene. The intense consciousness towards reality and emphasis on locality were the obvious concerns for the Taiwanese art scene in the 1980s. As a parallel thread of development in the Taiwanese art scene, artists welcomed information and messages from the western Avant-garde art trends and transferred them into a language for modern art included important artists such as Hu Kun-jung himself, Chuang Pu, Lai Chun-chun and artists who participated in exhibitions such as “Alien-Play of Space” and “Transcendent-Play of Space II Exhibition.” Those young artists were inspired by Richard Lin his artistic Extremism in creativity and eventually gathered together as a group of artists. Compare to Taipei Painting School, the internal coherence of this group art concept is more intense than its external activism and thus became an important vein of the Taiwanese art movement in the 1980s.