The Fragments of Dream, Logic of Sensation, and Manifestation of Night in Hsieh Wen-chien’s Startled Dream

Written by WANG MUTI

Artist: Hsieh Wen-chien

Artwork: Startled Dream / 100 × 90 cm / Acrylic / 2023

This is not a work that "depicts a dream," but a work that shows "how a dream invades form." Most people, when discussing dreams, tend to treat them as narratives: a sequence of blurred scenes, phantom silhouettes, and events vaguely remembered upon waking but impossible to articulate clearly. Yet, truly profound dreams do not always linger in the heart as stories. What makes a dream impossible to put down for a long time is frequently not what was dreamed, but how the dream fundamentally altered the body’s perception of the world—as if space suddenly warped, forms began to penetrate one another, color arrived in consciousness before the object did, or an internal black hole opened momentarily between sleeping and waking.

Hsieh Wen-chien’s Startled Dream is precisely not a work that "paints what happens inside a dream," but a work depicting how a dream tears open the contours of reality before it has even concluded. The canvas offers no stable, complete scenery, nor any easily identifiable spatial order. On the contrary, the entire painting is constructed through the compressing, piercing, and dragging of color blocks and brushstrokes of deep blue, black, purple, red, yellow, and white. It forms a hybrid arena that is simultaneously body and space, countenance and fissure, folded interior and the inner layer of consciousness. Near the lower middle, the silhouette of a face slanting or lying on its side is faintly visible; above and to the left, forms resembling hands, bones, masks, or deep caverns flash into view. The red slices into the composition like a wound, the blue weighs down like deep water or the night sky, and the white fluid lines, like the most un-governable paths in a dream, pull all elements into an un-terminable internal vibration.

Therefore, what this work truly asks us to confront is not the dream itself, but: When a dream ceases to be merely an image in the mind and begins to rewrite the logic of the body, space, and sensation, can consciousness still maintain its integrity?

A startled dream is not a romantic illusion, but a manifestation within rupture. To understand the fractured yet impending force in Startled Dream, I first think of Walter Benjamin. In his discussions of modern experience, Benjamin placed immense weight on the relationship between "shock" and the "dream image." To Benjamin, a dream is not necessarily a gentle refuge; on the contrary, it is frequently a heterogeneous field reassembled from fragments of reality, historical debris, repressions, and sensory echoes. A dream is not an escape, but the return of reality in an alternatively distorted guise.

This point is extremely suited to Startled Dream. The "dream" in the painting has no pastoral, hazy sweetness, nor any tranquil, soft atmosphere of an illusory world; it resembles far more a manifestation born from a sensory rupture. Color blocks squeeze against one another, forms traverse each other, the red is less a decoration than a near-incision, and the black-blue background acts less as dark color than as an abyss swallowing all contours. The "startle" in the work is therefore not derived from an identifiable event, but from the collapse of order itself: the viewer can no longer arrange objects tidily through everyday vision, but must confront a state where the scene has not yet formed, yet is already packed with immense pressure.

Spoken in a Benjaminian way, this is a fragmentary truth. There is no complete world in the canvas, only fragments: a near-face that is not quite a face, a near-hand that is not quite a hand, a near-space that is not quite a space. But precisely because of this, the work comes closer to the truth of the dream. A dream is never a copy of reality; it is a resonance rearranged under an alternative logic after reality has been chopped to pieces. Every line of color, every block of deep blue, and every texture born from the friction between red and black in Startled Dream stands as a testimony to this resonance.

Therefore, this work does not provide the story of a dream, but provides the conditions of a dream: When order loosens, time ruptures, and the senses lose their normal division of labor, the dream begins.

This is not a represented image, but an event of sensation. If Benjamin allows us to see the work's fragmentariness and shock, Gilles Deleuze can address this painting almost directly. In his discourse on Francis Bacon, Deleuze repeatedly emphasized that truly vital painting does not lie in narrative or the reproduction of an event, but in painting "sensation" itself. That is to say, the forms within the painting do not exist to explain the world, but to force the viewer into a direct encounter with a certain force.

Startled Dream exactly belongs to this "logic of sensation." Although traces of the body exist within the canvas: a slanting face, fragments resembling fingers or limbs, and faint hints of eyes or bone joints, none of these are handled as stable representational images. They resemble far more the marks left upon the body by sensation:

• The distortion when repressed,
• The extension when pulled,
• The folding back when startled awake,
• The localized distortion when invaded by a dream.

In Deleuze’s language, this can be called a "Figure" rather than a "figurative image": forms remain on the canvas, but these forms do not exist to reproduce a recognizable object in the world; they exist to sustain forces. Thus, the red is not merely red, but a wound erupting into consciousness; the blue is not merely a background, but a deep current flattening space; the white linear flow is not a mere contour, but runs through the canvas like a nervous system, temporarily stitching the fractured senses together while remaining ready to tear them open at any moment.

What is strongest in Startled Dream is not form, but the sense of force left behind when form loses its stability. Therefore, this is not a painting to be "understood intellectually," but a painting that must be "viscerally felt." It does not require the viewer to first identify content, but to first accept an experience of internal disruption. This is precisely what Deleuze called the task of art: not to prove a reality, but to allow sensation to become an event upon the canvas.

The time of a dream is not a fleeting moment, but compressed duration. One of the strangest characteristics of a dream is that its time never submits to the clock. A few brief seconds can feel like an immensely long journey; scenes that cannot coexist in reality can transpire simultaneously in a dream. To find a philosophical language for the sense of time in Startled Dream, I think of Henri Bergson.

Bergson distinguishes between "external, quantifiable time" and "internal duration (durée)." Within duration, time is not a series of severable points, but an internal thickness born when the past, the present, and sensory remnants mutually permeate and compress one another. This is precisely the temporal structure of Startled Dream: all forms within the painting seem arranged not according to "before and after," but overlap with one another within the exact same moment. The blue-black masses above, the cross-cutting conflicts of red, yellow, and white at the center, and the slanting, purple-grey humanoid collapse below do not narrate a linear dream, but resemble disparate temporal layers surfacing simultaneously after being compressed.

Therefore, the "startle" in the work can be understood as a vibration brought by time compression. It is not that a single event terrifies a person, but that too many un-concluded perceptions, un-sedimented memories, and un-anchored images squeeze into consciousness at the exact same instant, and the body lacks the everyday logic to organize them, enduring them only in the manner of a dream. This also explains why the near-face form in the painting appears both present yet disordered: it is not a portrait, but a segment of internal duration momentarily condensed into a human face upon the canvas.

Bergson would remind us that true time is never smooth; it always accumulates within. Startled Dream is consequently not painting "a single dream," but portrays compressed time suddenly rupturing the surface. Those red and yellow flashes of hue, looking like wounds or fire, can actually be understood as the brightest nodules within compressed time; the black and blue resemble the deepest shadow layers deposited by time. The entire work is therefore not a momentary drama, but a duration that has suddenly found an outlet.

The other side of night—a dream is not rest, but exposure. If Bergson helps us understand the temporality of the dream, Maurice Blanchot can help us understand the nightness of the dream. When Blanchot discusses "night," he distinguishes between two kinds of night: one is the night that permits peaceful sleep, and the other is a deeper night—where the subject loses its stable position, objects wrench free from daytime order, and the world becomes at once immediate yet alien. What is truly terrifying is not blackness, but how darkness causes all things to begin losing their everyday logic.

The night in Startled Dream clearly belongs to the latter. The blue-black of the canvas is not a simple background, but a devouring field; it offers no secure anchor for the forms, but seems to pull the forms inward. The white line is prominent not merely because it is bright, but because it resembles a nerve forced into exposure within the dark night; the red is unforgettable not because it is vivid, but because that vibrancy carries an almost perilous visibility within the gloom. This night is not a night of slumber that gently enfolds, but that deeper night spoken of by Blanchot—where the subject is not protected, but handed over.

This also brings the work into a deeper resonance with the title "Startled Dream." What startles us about a dream is frequently not the sight of a terrifying object, but the fact that within the dream, the self can no longer govern its own boundaries. In Blanchot’s sense, the night exposes humans to an uncontrollable exteriority, and a dream is precisely a form of this exposure. Hsieh Wen-chien paints this predicament with absolute precision: hints of a body exist, yet there is no complete body; contours of a face remain, yet there is no secure identity; illusions of space are generated, yet one cannot truly stand firmly in any single position. The viewer is therefore not merely looking at a dream, but feels invited to enter that nightness where "the subject is stripped of shelter."

The work thus carries a rare courage: it makes no attempt to placate the dream with beautification, but allows the dream to retain its deep-seated discomfort—that sensation of being exposed to the alien strangeness within oneself during the night.

I especially want to talk about the areas in the painting that approximate faces. The tilted, near-closed face near the lower middle is the easiest place for the viewer’s gaze to anchor onto; but this face does not establish a subject like a traditional portrait does. It resembles far more a face floating up momentarily from fragmentation. To its side run hints approximating a mask, eye sockets, bone joints, or a gaze, filling the entire painting with a tension that "someone seems to be there."

This reminds me of Emmanuel Levinas. When Levinas discusses the "face," he is never explaining a face in the anatomical sense, but is saying: the true face is the manifestation of the Other that cannot be completely possessed or mastered by me. The face does not let me recognize someone, but forces me to acknowledge—that an existence exists outside my logic of control.

If we read Startled Dream from this perspective, the importance of that central facial shadow lies not in who it is, but in how it emerges amidst chaos as a "fissure of alterity" that remains unswallowed by the canvas. This face is both present and fragile, both clear and seeming as if it could be wiped away by a brushstroke at any moment. It is not a secure self-portrait, but an entity that makes one realize: even in the fragmentation of a dream, there remains an existence that cannot be reduced to a color block, demanding to be recognized there.

This makes Startled Dream not just an internal psychological work, but also a work about alterity. Because a dream is never just one's own monologue; a dream is always mixed with the shadows of others, the language of others, and the remnants of the external world. The face in the painting is moving precisely because it seems to be a "you" barely preserved from the torrent of color and force—an existence that has already manifested to me before I could completely understand it.

The necessity of acrylic: not a technique, but speed and resistance. Finally, we must return to the medium. This work uses acrylic, which is not a neutral technical note, but highly consistent with the spirit of the entire painting. One of the characteristics of acrylic is its ability to rapidly layer colors, repeatedly overwrite, and immediately leave strong boundaries, while simultaneously retaining localized transparency and scrape marks. This makes it extremely suitable for handling an image structure like Startled Dream:

• Needs speed, because dreams do not slowly line up to appear;
• Needs overwriting, because forms in a dream are always covered by the next layer of consciousness;
• Needs resistance, because colors must violently collide with each other, and cannot merge too compliantly.

Hsieh Wen-chien's painting method obviously utilizes this character of acrylic. The red in the painting is not gently harmonized into the blue, but seems to cut in brutally; the white linear flow is not an ethereal light-mist, but possesses traces of having been pulled back out again later; the deep blue and black are not watercolor-like etherealness, but carry the weight of layers stacked up, pressing everything down. Precisely because of this, the medium itself became the constructor of the dream: not coloring the dream, but endowing the dream with its proper speed, collision, and a texture that cannot stay peacefully.

This point also distances the work from general lyrical abstraction. It does not soften the dream, but lets the dream exist in its original intensity. This un-compromising, un-pandering material attitude exactly achieves the ideological density of the work.

The true startle lies not in seeing something in a dream, but in the dream making the world lose its original position. If Hsieh Wen-chien’s Startled Dream is understood merely as an abstract painting, or a work expressing the tension of a dreamscape, it remains insufficient to explain its true depth. Its more important aspect is that it elevates the dream from a psychological subject into a philosophical event: a dream is not an illusory story, but how sensation takes the lead when order loosens; it is not an ornament of the night, but the other side of the night; it is not the subject safely viewing the interior, but the subject forced to be exposed at the boundary between the internal and external.

Benjamin lets us see fragments and shock; Deleuze lets us see sensation become an event; Bergson lets us see how time is compressed in a dream; Blanchot lets us see how the night no longer provides shelter; Levinas reminds us that in the disorder of the dream, the glimmer of a face still refuses to be completely erased.

If I were to summarize it in one sentence, I would say this:

What Startled Dream paints is not the scenery in a dream, but how the dream smashes the contours of reality one step ahead, letting us see that we are not complete even before we wake up.

Hsieh Wen-chien’s Startled Dream uses acrylic medium to construct an internal field situated between the body, the face, the fissure, and the color block. The canvas does not reproduce the dream through narrative, but uses the interlaced overwriting of deep blue, black, red, yellow, and white to present how the dream invades the body and space as an event of sensation. Borrowing Benjamin's concepts of "dream image" and shock, it can be seen that the work is not a romantic illusion, but a recombination of reality's fragments within a heterogeneous logic; Deleuze's theory of sensation explains why its images do not belong to representation, but are traces left by force. From Bergson's duration of time to Blanchot's depth of night, Startled Dream further reveals that a dream is not just an image during sleep, but a philosophical exposure after the temporary destabilization of the order of consciousness. Overall, what this work truly depicts is not the content of a dream, but how a dream cracks open the world and the self at the same time.