Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Jury's Comment for the 15th Grand Prize Winner

Huai Mo Village is awarded the grand prize for its artistry, its strong humanitarian concern and cross-cultural features, juxtaposing this place and the other place, reality and virtuality.

HSU Chia Wei creates an engaging, complex universe that opens up understanding and imagination of geopolitical events, with their continuing ramifications on human beings through time.

Huai Mo Village discusses a secret history and forgotten people resulting from the political struggles of the Cold War, at the border of Thailand and Myanmar. The project rigorously integrates documentary, puppetry, dance, literature, history, and field research, which form the rich vocabulary of the artwork.

HSU, who is an outsider in this context, collaborates with the protagonists to collectively author their narrative. The protagonists are confessors and interrogators, with the viewers being suspended in an impossible return.

Comments on the Finalist

Comparing to HSU Chia-Wei's previous works - whether it is The Story of Hoping Island (2008), which features history and memory told through an elderly female voice in a foreign tongue, or the series of Marshal Tie Jia (2013-2014) that replaces the artist's subject with folk religion - although the main narrative of HSU's solo exhibition at Hong Gah Museum in 2016, Huai Mo Village, still centers on Asia's historical absence informed by countless warfare throughout the middle of the last century. However, it also reveals more meta-strategies, which have caught the audience's eyes with those seemingly irrelevant transitions in the narratives and plots while triggering their problematics about the historical absence. Who exactly is providing the narrative? How could we distinguish the narrated from the narrator? How can the history of others become our history? (Commentator: JIAN Tzu-Chieh)

Artwork Introduction

HSU Chia-Wei creates videos and installations to build perceptive visual narratives about geographical, historical, and cultural regions in Asia. The artist reveals how the lives of modern people are fundamentally transformed by the dense and complex layers of cultures and histories. From 2012 until now, HSU has continued developing his Huai Mo Village project for 5 years. His art practice often starts and is based on “location,” and further excavates the memory and identity hidden within.

This project maintains the same art practice, while expanding it and covers larger issues regarding the Asian regions, such as colonialism and the Cold War history.This exhibition featured four video artworks, including two new pieces made in 2015 that were shown for the first time in Taiwan: Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau, and installation work, Memory Chamber of the Intelligence Bureau. The other two pieces evolved around the same topic, Huai Mo Village, created in 2012, and installation work, Huai Mo Village - District 1920 Guangwu Troop Department of Defense Chinese Affairs Team, made in 2013.

About the Artist

HSU Chia-Wei was born in Taichung, and now lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. He is interested in the forgotten histories of the Cold War in Asia. His works develop a keen sensitivity and perceptibility that weaves together reality and illusion, history and the present by building a circuit of events of people and places off the screen of history. He has been continuously trying to merge the languages of contemporary art and film to develop his works. Meanwhile, he also pays attention on how to negotiate with reality through film creation, fabricating a heterogeneous narrative posited between fiction and reality. Upholding a critical attitude and through the power of film creation, he strives to focus on sites outside museums as a means to achieve the goal of politicizing the practice of film creation.