Kuo Szumin's planes

One orange-red structure rises four and a half metres at the far end of Tina Keng Gallery. Around it, smaller works sit on wooden plinths and low platforms: painted iron, bare iron, stainless steel. Some are no taller than a person's shin. The room holds sculptures made between 2011 and 2026. Across those years, Kuo returns to the plane at different scales and in different metals.

Kuo keeps the plane central because its appearance changes with position. Look straight at one and it has width, color, and apparent weight. Move toward its edge and the same sheet contracts until it nearly becomes a line. A small change of position can turn a face into an opening or gather several thin surfaces into something that reads as a mass.

《共生 #1》 (Interdependence #1) is the only pictured work on the gallery's current page dated 2026. It is forty-four centimetres high, painted iron, and open through most of its volume. A thin base supports folded orange-red planes around two irregular openings. Light in the photograph leaves one face pale and another deep red.

《內照空間 #3》 (Inner Space #3) shows two upright iron units. Each has a broad bent perimeter, narrow internal rods, and a rectangular opening. In the photograph, one outline overlaps the other while both openings leave the ground visible.

《冉冉而生 #4》 (Germinating #4) is painted stainless steel, 450 centimetres high. Two long orange-red legs rise from a low base and meet through folded planes around a central opening. A blurred adult in the gallery photograph barely reaches the lower portion of the work. The surrounding wall remains visible through the opening.

Kuo begins with paper models, folding, cutting, rotating, and revising them before the forms are made in metal. In a current interview with Yuan Shih-pei for 500輯, she describes working with metalworkers while personally checking joint angles and the grinding of welds.

Paint gives Interdependence #1 and Germinating #4 their orange-red. The stainless steel of 《境外之石 #14》 (Metamorphosis #14) catches a bright band along one upper plane while the faces below stay dark or reflective. Kuo's current interview also discusses her first deliberate rust-effect works, made for this exhibition.

Kuo says Sculptural Poems is not intended as a romantic title. She compares her decisions to a poet working with a small number of exact elements and putting them into unfamiliar combinations. The plane supplies one such element; folds, joints, surfaces, and openings change what it does. She prefers forms that can be placed in more than one orientation and does not want a work exhausted in one glance.

The exhibition brings more than thirty works into a room Kuo first rebuilt as a scale model. She arranged and rearranged miniature works before the full installation.