Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Jury’s Comments for the Grand Prize Winner

HSU Che-Yu’s work indicates a new trend of inter-textural reference between visual art and creative writing in Taiwan’s contemporary art scene. This exhibition sophisticatedly deploys multi-leveled texts to deal with the dialectic relationship between reality, representation and construction of media, memory, history and death. The exhibition’s rich installation elements blend into the narrative themes. The looming theatrical atmosphere brings the spectators into a liminal situation.

Jury’s Comments for the Annual Shortlist Award Winner

HSU Che-Yu’s video has a powerful and unique style. The exhibition displayed his control over a multi-layered narrative that attempted to show the cruelty and absurdity of death. The exhibition revealed a concentrated and acute awareness of the space, guiding the body and perception into a dire, critical status while offering a contemporary dialectical contemplation on “the representation of death.”

The artist added hand-drawn figures in the images, replacing authentic characters with flat, comic ones. As the audience learned about the suicide of a young writer, the artist introduced his own images and revealed the private aspects of his family, friends, and himself. Interwoven with multiple texts and narrative voices, the core issue grew from that of an individual to a number of people, allowing the exhibition to unfold the publicness of a news event from a personal, private perspective.

Comments on the Finalist

Microphone Test appeared to be a work created with a contemporary means by HSU Che-Yu, focusing on the suicide of a young writer, and therefore, making the work fairly contentious. Employing his usual techniques, the artist added hand-drawn figures in the images, replacing the real people with flat, cartoon characters. The audience could only glimpse into the death of the young writer through the translation of media. Such translation allowed the event to be spread and known; however, for the deceased, the process also promised an excess of omissions. As a result, the reality became something that was reproduced through repeated representation. It reminded us of those anxiety-inducing hand-drawn characters by the artist, which were also additions onto reality, and the more that was added, the more we lost. In this particular video, he also drew and included his own image for the first time. (Commentator: JIAN Tzu-Chieh)

Artwork Introduction

The Microphone Test series is named after writer Huang Guo-Jun’s work Microphone Test. Two months before Huang committed suicide, he wrote an essay in epistolary style titled“To Mother,” in which he expressed his intention to kill himself to his mother. The writing style is filled with black humor and expressive quality, but he killed himself two months after he wrote this letter, and he did not leave any suicide note. The fictional aspect of the work contrasts with the realistic aspect of life, while the indistinguishable part within has always been my focus in my works.  

About the Artist

Born in Taipei in 1985. Graduated from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts. Mainly works with video and installation as creative medium. Currently a freelance artworker. Major exhibition experiences include solo exhibition “Microphone Test” (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan), “Familiar Otherness: Art Across Northeast Asia” (Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, China), “Visions and Beyond: The Second Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale” (OCT LOFT, Shenzhen, China), “CAFAM • Future” (CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China), “Moving Image Istanbul” (Kuleli Building, Istanbul, Turkey), “Language is a Virus” (Ilam Campus Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand) in 2015, “NordArt 2014” (Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf, Germany)