Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Jury’s Comment for the Visual Arts Award Winner

SU Hui-Yu recreates and reshoots missing scenes from original script details of the film made by CHIU Kang-Chien, The Glamorous Boys of Tang, introducing a new dynamic between history and the present moment. With the four-channel video installation in the form of a folding screen, and a highly stylized video and audio language, the artwork reinvigorates a piece of forgotten film history in Taiwan. Another significant achievement of The Glamorous Boys of Tang (1985, Chui Kang-Chien) is to look back at the suffocating control over eroticism and desire during the martial law ruling period. The artwork responds to a sense of urgency about the liberation of human desire, body, and gender in Taiwan, while presenting a transcendent artistic vision.    

Comments on the Finalist

This work is a multi-channel video work that revisits Taiwanese cinema, which artist Su Hui-Yu creates in the name of re-shooting. Nevertheless, the re-shooting of the transient details and the end missing from the script beckons at something more than a paean because the artist has indeed converted and expanded the potentiality of the unfinished film through this work. As the roles, their bodies and the time in the work are transformed and blurred in a continual and fluid manner, the Tang dynasty of this contemporary era ushers in a new opportunity for the artist to initiate a dialogue with history. The four-channel video installation that adopts the style of a folding-screen gives the lurking shadow of desire a chance to manifest on the foldable, juxtaposed screens. In Su’s time of marriage equality when almost nothing is considered a taboo, the concerns that once hindered Chui Kang-Chien from publishing his film completed in the era of the martial law have already morphed into the full liberation of the body and desires as well as the deconstruction of public order and good morals. Seductive and tempting, The Glamorous Boys of Tang (1985, Chui Kang-Chien) reminds us of a carnivalesque LGBTQIA Pride charged with electronic music and can only be wilder, freer and unrulier than the original version.

(Commentator: SING Song-Yong)

Jury’s Comments for the Visual Arts Award Winner

SU Hui-Yu recreates and reshoots missing scenes from original script details of the film made by CHIU Kang-Chien, The Glamorous Boys of Tang, introducing a new dynamic between history and the present moment. With the four-channel video installation in the form of a folding screen, and a highly stylized video and audio language, the artwork reinvigorates a piece of forgotten film history in Taiwan. Another significant achievement of The Glamorous Boys of Tang (1985, Chui Kang-Chien) is to look back at the suffocating control over eroticism and desire during the martial law ruling period. The artwork responds to a sense of urgency about the liberation of human desire, body, and gender in Taiwan, while presenting a transcendent artistic vision.

Artwork Introduction

In recent years, Su Hui-Yu has used the method of “re-shooting” to reinterpret historic texts. This work is based on the homonymous film, The Glamorous Boys of Tang, directed by famous poet and playwright Chui Kang-Chien in 1985, which was a highly experimental, atypical film that did not enjoy a great box office and much positive feedback. However, the same-sex male sexual tension, combined with scenes of violence, death and orgies as well as incongruent sound effects generated by synthesizer, bizarre settings and costumes, revealed its creator’s ambition to create dialogues with Western cinematic classics, rendering the film a fine example of the cult film. More than three decades later, Su’s The Glamorous Boys of Tang (1985, Chui Kang-Chien), created using the method of re-shooting with new resources and film techniques, brings together a spectrum of different body images and subcultural communities in today’s contemporary pluralist society, supplementing, reinterpreting and recreating the original version from 1985.

About the Artist

SU Hui-Yu

Su Hui-Yu holds an MFA from Taipei National University of the Arts. His recent work revolves arounds ancient books, old films and his collection of anecdotes and unofficial histories, which he re-reads, re-interprets and re-constructs to gain new insights into existing topics of body, existence and history. His works have been shown in various renowned art galleries and museums in Taiwan and abroad, including Museo Jumex in Mexico, Kunstmuseum Bonn in Germany and Power Station of Art in Shanghai, and have been featured in international film festivals, such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, Buenos Aires International Film Festival and Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, etc.

Production Team

Director/artist：Su Hui-Yu

1st Assistant Director：Chan Ki-Yan

Cast：Chocorockxin Lee, Popcorn, Huang Hsu-Wei

Producer：Huang Ching-Han

Cinematography：Chen Kuen-Yu

Production Design：Su Hui-Yu

Music/Sound：Braire Ko, Su Hui-Yu

Costume Design：Huang Ching-Han

Post-production supervisor：Tomi Kuo

Colorist：Chian Yi-Hsun/Cinema 4