Misty: Lo Chan-Pang

06 Jun Misty: Lo Chan-Pang

The Spiritual Kingdom, Revealed in Reality — A Critique of Lo Chan-Pang’s “Misty” Series
By Woan-Jen Hsu

After several years of anticipation, Lo Chan-Pang unveiled his new series Misty Ink (Molan) in June 2017. As the name suggests, ink is the central medium of this body of work. Yet, looking back at Lo’s artistic beginnings, his early creations were in oil paint, rendered with hyperrealistic precision.

Lo first gained recognition with his Strawberry Generation series, which debuted in his 2009 solo exhibition Strawberry Studio Invasion. This body of work depicted members of the so-called “Strawberry Generation”—a term used to describe a younger demographic perceived as delicate and fragile—capturing their outward expressions as they confronted societal pressures. The artist’s meticulous oil painting technique drew immediate attention. However, it was the vibrant, rebellious, heavily made-up figures that truly captivated viewers. Despite their defiant appearances, the figures revealed a deeper sense of inner emptiness and disorientation. Their ostentatious behavior was merely a desperate assertion of significance and visibility. Bathed in the bluish-green glow of screens, Lo’s strawberry youths were ironically elevated to icons—granted a kind of contemporary sainthood. Through these works, Lo declared to the older generation that it is this vividly adorned yet inwardly fragile generation that defines the spirit of the times.

Following the Strawberry Generation, Lo released the Ashen Face series, inspired by the legendary white-faced, golden-furred nine-tailed fox from Japanese folklore. The title “Ashen Face” refers to young girls depicted with the alluring mystique of the fox spirit, yet their pallor results from being consumed by ashes—youths prematurely burnt out, sustained only by faint embers of life. The dazzling colors and divine glow of earlier works faded, replaced by haunting solitude, where these ghostly-white youths silently nursed their wounds. This was a chilling yet intimate portrayal of adolescence—something one must endure personally, with no substitution possible.

In 2011, during a residency in Berlin, Lo encountered Western street graffiti. This inspired him to experiment with combining ink and acrylics to produce black spray-paint effects, incorporating splatters and drips—a new form of painting emerged. His Berlin Calling series extended the Ashen Face’s withdrawal from color, reducing his palette to stark black and white. These works summoned the artist’s rawest inner self, stripped of the ornamental “garments” imposed by societal norms. Emotions, long suppressed, erupted violently. Lo envisioned a world of pure black and white—a simplified moral universe—but soon recognized the inevitable volatility such absolutes bring. The explosive tension born of rigid binaries made escape impossible. After this catharsis, Lo regained composure, returning to his acute observational powers. Viewing the historical and cultural context from a broader perspective, he created the Wanderer in the Mist series.

Though short-lived, Wanderer in the Mist served as a transition. Within Lo’s broader artistic trajectory, the Misty Ink series marks a critical turning point. It retains the realism of the Strawberry Generation, but abandons its extravagant visual clashes. Each face in Misty Ink is carefully rendered in monochromatic light and shadow. The series continues the ashen imagery of Ashen Face, where ash disperses into misty emptiness, but can also coalesce into tangible, perceptible form. It maintains the ink-acrylic blend of Berlin Calling, though the previous explosive splatters are now carefully restrained, appearing only selectively.

As a turning point, Misty Ink resembles mountain fog—ethereal and enveloping. Lo employs traditional Eastern ink mediums but executes them with Western techniques: blending, dripping, spraying, and the detailed rendering of hair and volume through light and shadow—all harmonized seamlessly. His painting process becomes entwined with his emotional state, each moment brimming with countless thoughts, alternating between revelation and concealment. Through this, he ultimately returns to his spiritual core. With his gaze turned inward, Lo begins to explore the hidden inner self, awakening and activating his spiritual senses, contemplating true existence, and initiating an inner dialogue.

In Misty Ink, Lo depicts several key figures from Christianity—Moses, Joshua, David, Paul, and even Jesus. He does not illustrate their dramatic biblical feats or emphasize their personalities or physical traits as traditional Western religious art does. His Moses is not awe-inspiring or aged; his Joshua lacks heroic vigor; his David is not soft or gentle. Lo rejects painting as mere illustration. What he paints is the spiritual connection he feels with them—a kind of communion of hearts. Simply put, Lo portrays how they “manifested” themselves to him—not as visual references, but as divine inspiration. This inspiration does not stem from the physical world but from spiritual forces. To receive it, one must connect with the unseen—with the Bible, with Jesus Christ. The work Moment of Connection captures that extraordinary instant when the physical eyes close and the eyes of the soul open.

What sets Misty Ink apart from Lo’s previous work is its focus on the manifestation of inner thoughts, rather than the depiction of external subjects. Mental imagery replaces physical forms. Thus, the paintings Moses, Joshua, David, and Apostle Paul are not renderings of their biblical appearances, but the mental impressions that surfaced in Lo’s consciousness during introspection.

The painting Presence conveys the divine concept of “presence.” This does not suggest that God or some entity literally descends from the heavens, but symbolizes a transformation of human awareness—from intellectual reasoning to pure consciousness. As a transcendent being, God permeates time and space with absolute intensity. In the absence of time or space, there is only presence—God as the eternal I Am That I Am. Yet even Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, expressed doubt: “Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus replied, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” The painting The Way, the Truth, the Life communicates this essential doctrine: that God’s presence is attained through Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life.

The Misty Ink series is a spiritual realm crafted by Lo Chan-Pang. In this realm, appearance and reality are reversed. Physical objects are revealed as illusory, while subjective consciousness becomes the true substance of existence.