Andy Warhol created his signature painting, Flowers, in 1964. To make this masterpiece, Warhol transformed a banal photograph of four hibiscus flowers into a brilliant silkscreen. At first glance, the work seems merely decorative, a perfect “over-the-couch” picture. Yet, it is not a coincidence that the work was made at the height of “flower power,” a catch-phrase for the youth rebellion of the 1960s. The question remains, “is this work a decoration or a stroke of genius?”
Like Warhol, Su Meng-Hung walks a tightrope between the decorative and the profound. He references hallmarks of both Chinese and contemporary art histories in his astounding creations. They are facsimiles of lacquer work, mother-of-pearl inlay and antique folding screens. But they also reference Pop Art, silkscreen printing and digital screens—past and future at the same time. He registers an acknowledgement of juxtaposed traditions yet posits a new approach that redefines what art can be in a post-globalized world.
The popularity of flower motifs is the alleged subject of Su’s new work. He happily combines examples: centuries-old Chinese scrolls, 17th century European paintings, drawings from early botanical guides and occasionally, illustrations from antique pornography manuals. The popularity of floral images is undeniable in both the East and the West. Flower-focused art movements flourished throughout many art histories. To Su, the image of a flower presents the possibility of a universal icon, legible to populations throughout the world.
To highlight and strengthen this inquiry, Su has built a garden within the Tina Keng gallery. The installation combines the forced perspective of Versailles and the imitation of naturalism of Jiangnan gardens—both geometric and lyrical. The artworks are displayed at different elevations, allowing visitors to navigate the environment in unique ways. Just as every garden imposes a frame on a once-natural landscape, Su encourages viewers to step inside his perspective of the flower phenomenon. The gallery becomes a site of engaged inquiry, not a place of passive viewing.
By studying the works of Warhol and other American Pop artists, Su discovered that the art of irony is best conveyed through the use of the silkscreen. He covers his artwork’s surfaces with hundreds of images printed on their surface. He does not create any of these images. He appropriates them from diverse sources. Catalogues, encyclopedias, 17th century French and Dutch paintings of bulging bouquets and the classic 17th century Chinese text, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, are found on the shelves of his studio. Su also admires the paintings of Giuseppe Castiglione, an 18th century Italian Jesuit missionary who served as an artist in the Imperial court; Castiglione applied the Renaissance use of perspective onto bird-and-flower variations from ancient ink-and-brush scrolls. Like much of Su’s work, these drawings were both falsehoods and beautiful.
“Inauthentic beauty”, such as that of Castiglione, is now central to Su’s investigations and highlights important conditions of artmaking in the 21st century. This artist explores the meaning of the term “authenticity”, a central query for Taiwanese artists who survive in a culture impacted by Chinese and Japanese art as well as the country’s indigenous traditions.
It is not surprising that Su was fascinated by the roots of “inauthenticity”, which he found in the origins of international trade in the 17th century and the creation of what is now called “export art.” The so-called Coromandel screens, cloisonné, mother-of-pearl inlay and fret patterns found in Chinoiserie delivered fantasies of the Orient for European collectors; they are souvenirs from a place that most Western aristocrats would never visit. The exquisite screens that Su has recreated are precise examples of his ideas about “inauthentic beauty.”
For this current exhibition, Su created facsimiles of antique standing screens that look like they came from an earlier era. His paintings, on the other hand, appear to have dropped to earth from outer space. There is a push-pull in these creations, bringing us back and forth in time. It produces the sensation of timelessness.
The centerpiece of the current show is a replica of a folding screen, The Coromandel Screen (Flowing Clouds), covered in a hypnotic pattern of ultraviolet, vivid orange and fleshy pinks against a dark black background. On close inspection you can discern outlines of evergreen trees and iris fields with a random drawing of a horse here and there. This is not a logical narrative. It is a hallucination best seen from afar when the colors pop-out like neon-lights against a nightscape of an artist’s imagination.
As Su Meng-Hung points out, the very essence of a Coromandel screen is, for him, an act of imagination, not a reflection of his “lived experience.” He first encountered the image of a Coromandel folding screen in a photograph of French fashion icon Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment which was filled with modernist paintings hanging beside these examples of Chinoiserie. It interested him that the presence of these screens indicated an interest in the exotic Orient, an attachment to a distorted version of Chinese art. However, Su is equally aware that today replicas of Coromandel screens inundate Asian cities, like Taipei, as exotic props for wedding ceremonies and backdrops for photo studios. He is fascinated about the ways that culture has become a two way street with ideas and art traveling in both directions. There seems to be no way to find a genuine cultural object, now that globalization has made sampling like Su’s so accessible.
This is even more so the case with Su’s monumental paintings, which are freed from the structure of the screen, such as Flower of Coromandel (Crimson) and its mate, Flower of Coromandel (Prussian Blue), both created in 2026. Here, it is interesting to note that Coromandel is a very real coastal region off the coast of India, a Portuguese colony until the British took it over in the 18th century. The name was adopted as a term of trade and never left common usage. The landscape of Coromandel and its botanicals were documented by William Roxburgh under the direction of master explorer Sir Joseph Banks in a 1795 book. Su discovered similar illustrations in a bookstore in Europe in 2025 and many such images are embedded, but barely visible, in these magnificent abstractions.
On close examination, Flower of Coromandel (Crimson) and Flower of Coromandel (Prussian Blue) are encyclopedias of floral iconography. The surface of these paintings are microcosms of color, embedded with layers of pigments. The images of flowers are barely legible and the painting seems on the verge of an explosion. Yet, this clash of colors is harmonized by Su’s masterful touch.
His paintings and screens are magically created by the thousand-year-old Bientu technique, a lacquer method the artist adapted with layers of screen prints, each sanded and polished, then finished with a sealant. This time-consuming process—on/off, on/off—creates spectacular psychedelic abstractions, gleaming from gold and silver mixed into the pigments. It is a process that is a far cry from Andy Warhol’s ultra-cool factory. It is good to keep in mind that both the patterns and practice of painting come from sources beyond Su Meng-Hung’s formal training, stolen from other cultures and timeframes.
Su Meng-Hung’s impeccable craftsmanship adds another wrinkle to this discussion. Su’s dazzling and hypnotic surfaces demand a reexamination of prejudices that denigrate craft as non-art and that pigeon-hole Asian artists as derivative. Su Meng-Hung embraces the accusation of derivativeness and turns it on its head. Like western artists who push appropriated images – Richard Prince, Robert Longo, Barbara Kruger – he demands the same kind of freedom.
In the end, Su Meng-Hung’s unique artworks raise precisely those questions that audience members may ask: Are Su’s works authentic or inauthentic? Are they export trade or genuinely Taiwanese? And what does that mean anyway in the globalized art history we see today?
These issues may be relevant to viewers today because we are taught to believe that connoisseurship demands “authenticity” and “originality” as the basis of value. Often, if the craftsmanship is too perfect, it runs the risk of being dismissed as decorative. Su sidesteps this criticism by providing a theoretical basis for his work. For him, craft is a theory-in-action. His ideas and his touch are equal.
Su knows that authenticity is impossible to find, now that global markets generate highly distributable objects every minute. The market is rapidly replacing the ideal of originality with the goals of mass popularity. Today all artworks are Coromandel screens–made in one place for the tastes of another–with multilayered influences most challenging to untangle. For Su, the collision between the authentic and the fake is evident in each work’s vital originality. It restores a kind of universality to art, especially at a moment when conflict, not resolution, is the directive.
In contrast to today’s chaotic disagreements, Su achieves a kind of harmony in his experimental artworks. He explores the history and impact of floral imagery, finding more in common between Asian and European traditions than can be seen at first glance. Both cultures were searching for a common language at the advent of international relations. Today that search for universality seems like a naive enterprise. However, Su embraces that search as a challenge, a dare, for contemporary artists.
