TANG Jo-Hung was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1975. He graduated from the Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School in 1995 and obtained a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Fine Arts, Tunghai University in 1998. Tang pursued further studies at the University of Salamanca in Spain in 2001 and graduated with a master’s degree in fine arts. The artist bagged the San Marco Prize there in 2002. With solid training and incessant practice, Tang stood out as the grand prize winner of the Kaohsiung Awards in 2005 after he returned to Taiwan, and received the Liao Chi-Chun Oil Painting Award in 2008. Tang is known for his expressive, emotionally contagious artistic style. His Self and Dog series, initiated in 2002, demonstrates a highly personal and distinctive artistic painting language. 

Self-image, dog, still life and landscape are the prominent themes in Tang’s works. The artist’s pet dog “Cookery” especially serves as a personified image of him and an embodiment of his emotions. The inter-references among the dog, the artist and others, central to his paintings, are presented through wild brushwork and strong colors. It can particularly be seen in the artist’s “people and self” selfportraits in 2002, featured by a sculptural touch and an ever-evolving style, that the artist has hoped to learn his true self and present his findings to viewers by studying his relationship with others. 

“People-self” has remained a critical theme in Hung’s works. Completed in 2002, People-Self Dog comes in the form of the artist’s favorite painting genre of that time — bust portrait. The artwork is imbued with layers of color paint and wild brushwork. A figural painting at a glance, it effectively renders multifarious abstract expressions. It is hard to discern which figure is the artist, the dog, or the other, or who is the protagonist, the painted subject, or the referenced object. Tang’s such paintings turn self-portraying into a dialogue between one’s internal spirituality and external image. 

Most of the new-generation artists born in the 1970s and after are concentrated on self explorations. They often take everyday things to represent themselves, or make analogies from daily experiences. Hung is no exception. He takes his pet dog “Cookery” as an important subject matter in his series of self portraits. 

When it comes to “self” and “subjectivity,” new-generation artists emphasize their bodily experiences and spiritual perceptions of their “artistic moments” much more than the originality of art once lauded by their predecessors of the 90s. The contemporarity of subjectivity can be influenced by factors like time, and thus the new-generation aesthetics is featured by a kind of “fluidity,” be it painting or other types of art. Such “fluidity” has enabled these artists to adjust their positions in art and reflect upon themselves.