Hsiung’s work takes the form of paintings, murals, video and installation. Throughout her work she sets a cast of characters into fantasy and real environments to create emotionally-charged images and graphic sensations. Spontaneous, absurd and surreal her work reveals vivid and sometimes visceral facets of identities and their environments.

A Chinese-American who grew up in the 80s in Los Angeles, her visual language is influenced by American popular and youth imagery of the 80s and Chinese and East Asian products, toys and cartoons. Her paintings and murals also owe much to the aesthetic economy of computer and comic design, logos and adverts. Iconic and familiar, her characters emerge to escape or lay claim to ambient computer-animate backgrounds. Abstract figures populate the scenes along with giant surrealist eyeballs, food and insects, floating brains and falling daggers – these are some of the creatures that flood Hsiung’s imagination. Vividly defined shapes, collaged onto mercurial landscapes and mysterious narratives they express or illustrate feelings and sensations bound up in the nexus of living. Whether floating spines with empty faces or hungry eyes over easy prey Hsiung’s paintings animate the hungry and the hungered.

Hsiung’s videos quote the format of early pop videos, commercials and comic-book story-telling. They feature Hsiung in various everyday and caricatured guises of both genders. Cut to ambient and hard rock soundtracks Hsiung mixes real images with graphic interventions to create bizarre private and public worlds, charged with fiction and autobiography.

Overfiend is Hsiung’s first UK solo show. Other shows have included Upriver Gallery, Kunming, China; The Power of Women’s Laughter, China Art Objects, Los Angeles; Junge Szene 1996, Wiener Secession Museum, Vienna; Short Ends Film Festival, ICA, London; Chokerfuckingblocked, Jeffrey Charles Gallery, London.