Hou Chun-Ming’s acclaimed God Searching employs traditional Chinese printmaking techniques to overwhelm viewers with intricacy and resplendence: “I used deformed, convoluted bodies to magnify the desires of people and their resistance to oppression. It is a steely and never-ending will to survive.”God Searching” is the name of an ancient Chinese book. Its author Gan Bao, an official during the Jin Dynasty, collected many stories about spirits and mysterious figures in order to give moral advice or prophesies for the society or to warn people of evil doing. Hou has described the making of this work: “When I created God Searching, martial law had just been lifted in Taiwan, allowing for the discussion of many previously forbidden topics. This coincided with Taiwan’s economic miracle, and the society quickly filled with strange happenings and events. I used traditional Chinese mythology and my own life experiences to subvert and analogize the social issues of that time. I created eighteen gods to represent these issues, each in the shape of Xing Tian – a mythical giant expressing the idea that ‘desire never dies.
I named and wrote stories for each of these gods and invited many friends from different disciplines to write their stories too. This is similar to the method of writing in ancient Chinese books, in which one might find two versions of the same story. This has the effect of making the myths and morals even more confusing.”

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