The Need To Create

The need to create, the need to communicate and to use our imagination is in all of us – the young artist Pua Zhe Xuan is no exception.

Pua Zhe Xuan was born with autism. According to Kid’s health (America) - Autism causes children to experience the world differently from the way most other children do. It's hard for children with autism to talk with other people and express themselves using words. Children who have autism usually keep to themselves and many cannot communicate without special help.

Pua Zhe Xuan has developed skills in communication which are fresh for him and exciting for us. He has taken to making images to help him communicate his thoughts and feelings to the outside world. Over time, he has built up a portfolio of stunning imagery to tell his personal story and to reflect his thoughts and feelings about the world around him. Art has truly become a language for Pua Zhe Xuan, giving him a connection to a world he was born disconnected from.

As he has developed his artistic skills, Pua Zhe Xuan has been able to render complex patterns and eventually produce works of art worthy of notable artists such as the Swiss ‘Outsider’ artist Adolf Wölfli. Outsider art is that which is created outside the boundaries of the official art culture, and has included many fascinating artists and their work. Many of Pua Zhe Xuan’s images also resemble ‘naive’ artworks from places such as Haiti and more specifically the works of Hector Hyppolite, or the paintings of Frenchman Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier or the customs officer). 

Within Pua Zhe Xuan’s paintings there is often an unwitting comic element, such as cute overweight birds that should never fly – but do. They leap and fly from the boy’s imagination into our own. It is there they nest and nurse remarkable eggs of creativity. The boy’s unique artistic freedom captures our imaginations, helps us to fly, and enables us to imagine impossible but glorious worlds of his heart, and of his gentle spirit.

In those drawings by Pua Zhe Xuan, smiling lions and/or moustachioed tigers stand transfixed, as if spotted by an all too obvious camera, and pose. The comic nature comes from the all too human expressions on the animal faces. It is as if Aardman studios are in mid-capture of some comic animation, and the boy acting as their cell painter. But it is not a studio break, there is no studio and the boy reveals himself as the champion of his personal dilemma by communicating so precisely and so floridly to a multiple audience who clamber to see his slightly humorous works.

There are times when a doting parent guides his eager hand, but mostly Pua Zhe Xuan is resolutely his own person. Like any artist aware of his own mind, Pua Zhe Xuan shrugs off guidance in favour of a mind free to travel into unknown, and possibly unknowable, worlds. Like Wölfli or French naive artist Séraphine Louis, amazing floral themes re-occur within his unimaginable forests. Sometimes they dance like Heinz Edelmann’s cartoon illustrations for The Beatles ‘Yellow Submarine’. At other times Chinese lanterns and trees sway to an unheard, but universal, rhythm knowable only to the boy - Pua Zhe Xuan himself. Ferns and expressive leaves remind us of both Séraphine and of Hyppolite, their closeness to nature and the brightness of their imaginations. Pua Zhe Xuan blesses us with his visions of a warm, comfortable nature where the worst thing that can happen is we split our sides laughing at butterflies and dragonflies, which are far too plump, or having our ribs tickled by those comic cats.

Over a few years, aided by one enlightened teacher Pua Zhe Xuan has grown and acquired unique skills and boundless imagination to create his formidable imagery. There is little doubt that, as time slides forward, the boy Pua Zhe Xuan will become a remarkable young man who will delight in taking his audiences on spectacular visual rides. This is but the beginning of an incredible career in art. Already Pua Zhe Xuan has exhibited in Kuala Lumpur and journeyed to Cambodia

can also be read in Dusun 5