New York

It’s the mid-Sixties. For an ambitious young artist, there’s a choice. Paris is fading as an arts centre, and Hsiao Chin hadn’t found the right studio space in the city. He spent six months in swinging London, but found it too ‘leisurely’ for his liking. New York, the most dynamic art market in the world, the city of Warhol, Rauschenberg, De Kooning, Pollock, was the place to be.

If the Punto work was suffused with Mediterranean light and colour, the ‘Hard Edge’ works Hsiao Chin produced at this time were also a response to his environment. He painted not on canvas, mosaic or ceramics but sheet metal: the lines were harder, the compositions, if still true to the iconography of Eastern belief systems, more harshly geometric.

But new ideas were brewing. He visited Brazil and Mexico and began to muse on how ancient civilisations such as the Mayans and Aztecs incorporated astronomy and a sense of the universe’s movement into their lives.

His daughter, Samantha, was born in New York in 1967. But his seven-year marriage to Italian artist Pia Pizzo broke up in 1969 and he was finding the city hard going. ‘I lived there for six or seven years. But I could not make a living for us both, so my wife went back to Italy, then London. In ’73 I finally went back to Italy too’.