2022
HSU Che-Yu
許哲瑜
Blank Photograph
2022
Gray Room
VR360 Installation
16'06''
Inspired by the artist's ailment and medical examination, he contemplates the construction of intimate memories, from bodily and spatial perceptions to neuroscientific imagination in this VR project.
It begins with a memory from Hsu Che-Yu's childhood: waking up in the middle of his sleep and finding himself sitting outside the house. It felt like everything became displaced. Recent two years, Hsu has been bothered by unusual headaches. After medical examinations, he was diagnosed with Diplopia, the so-called double vision, which was induced by the nervous system. In modern medical research, almost all perceptions and emotions can be measured in Neuroscience; they are material components of the neuro system. Without any metaphysical understanding of emotion and spirit, the concept of the soul is thus challenged.
The Making of Crime Scenes
Rabbit 314
7'17''
2020
This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin. The death of a laboratory rabbit initial this project. A glove puppetry performer with the laboratory rabbit's dead body in hand reenacts the movements- imagined by humans- of rabbits.
The Unusual Death of a Mallard
Video Installation
16'45''
2020
This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin.
The inspiration comes from Hsu Che-Yu's family memory. Hsu's grandma served in an animal laboratory for 30 years. Due to the particularity of her job, grandma had to dissect living animals for observation and experiments. Sometimes, she would take the laboratory animals home, which later became his father's childhood playmates. Hsu Che-Yu attempt to probe how the body/life is taken as a part of the body of knowledge relying on real bodies and models, thus further exploring the relationship between death and digital stimulation technology.
Salute
Silk screen printing
2020
Single Copy
Video Installation, Glass fiber
21'17''
2019
This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin.
Hsu Che-Yu produce a digital-scan model and fiberglass cast of the body of the first Taiwanese conjoined twins. Through this process, Hsu attempts to explore the workings of biopolitics and the functioning of one’s memory.
The first conjoined twins underwent separation surgery in 1979 and the whole procedure was broadcast on TV. During that period, Taiwan was under martial law. In this way, this surgery was often interpreted as a metaphor for the relationship between Taiwan and China.
Back in 1979, in order to prepare for the separation surgery, the hospital invited an artist to make a cast of the conjoined twins. The attempt to make a cast was however unsuccessful, since it was difficult to control the babies during the moulding process.
In this project Single Copy, Hsu Che-Yu has re-casted the body of the now 43-year old Chang Chung-I, and also use 3D scanning technology to archive his body. The data from the archive are then used as sources for capturing memories from Chang’s earlier life. When Chang was 21 years old, he played a role in the movie, Falling Up Waking Down, portraying a teashop owner whose shop was inside a converted old bus. About two decades later, Chang has repeatedly thought about what it would be like to run that old bus-converted teashop. In real life, Chang is married with two kids, and this artwork overlaps his present life with the fictional setting.
Lacuna
Video
40'31''
2018
This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin.
Controversial news is visualized in detail through 3D animation, it’s all from a popular news company in Taiwan. Hsu Che-Yu cooperates with the News animator and police officer.
This video is about his brother’s family memories in the form of animation, and extend from these memories to two criminal cases that took place in the surrounding area: one teenager was murdered, which happened at an Internet café where his brother often used to go to in his adolescent years, and this event was made into an animation on the news. Another event also happened in Hsu's hometown; someone witnessed a dog wandering on the street, with a female’s head too rotten to be identified in its mouth. A police imagined and portrayed the female’s face before her death according to the shape of the skull.
The two events were separately made into portraitures on public media—a manga illustration made with 3D software by news media, and the portrait of the victim drawn with pencil by the police. The artist visited the police who produced the head profile of the female, as well as the storyboard director who made the news animation. By exploring their graphic techniques, Hsu Che-yu attempte to construct the images of his brother’s memories.
(中文介紹點選此處)
Re-rupture
In 1995, there was a human-shape balloon on the top of Chongxing Bridge in Taipei, and there was also the attempt of suspending all kinds of items in the air, such as washing machine, boiling hot pot, the statue of Chiang Kai-shek, and sex doll, trying to crash them to the ground. But the plan failed eventually; nothing was destroyed. Before everything started, it ended because of the self-explosion of the human-shape balloon. The same year under Chongxing Bridge, there was also a large scale fight. The people present there that day slashing each other with iron rod or sashimi knife. When the artist found the people invovled, however, they told Hsu it was actually a fight between political factions.
Re-rupture assembles two seemingly unrelated historical fragments: "People's Taxi riot" and "Taipei Breaking Sky." Hsu Che-Yu invited five drivers who participated in the fight at the time to return to the event site, while hanging a guitarist Li Na-Shao on the top of Chongxing Bridge to play music.

No News from Home
A Letter to Su Wanqin
Photography
2016
This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin. It based on a special tradition in the history of photography in Taiwan. It adopts a particular skill of making self-portraits in the 1960s by collaging a figure’s headshot with a painted body and background. These photos functioned as a memorial portrait of the old or the deceased. Due to the commodification, the same painted background in the pictures often appear in different families. The portrait photo of 103 years old Su Wanqin is the first example Hsu Che-Yu found that its background identical to Chen's grandfather’s photo. In the searching of the information about Su Wanqin, the artist learned that he once participated in the war in China as a Japanese soldier in the 1940s and now is the oldest Nationalist Party member alive.
After writing a letter telling him about the finding of identical painted background in the portraits, Hsu and Chen got a reply from the son of Su Wanqin. The son wrote on his father’s behalf to expose the condition of the old man’s late life. The artist built a relationship as short-term pen pals.
Photo Album Clips
Microphone Test
Video
25'18''
2015
麥克風試音:告別式|Microphone Test: Funeral Service
Triple-Screen Projection, Interactive Installation, Glass Fiber, Table and Chair, Plant
2015
This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin.
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.
Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun is a video letter to Huang Guo-Jun. Through conversations with Huang’s works created before he died, the letter depicts private family memories of three good friends, and attempts to portray what in fact belongs to the artist, or perhaps everyone’s memories through the memories of these others. Or perhaps, what is important is not whose memory it is, but the process that memory is constructed and viewed. Hsu Che-Yu invited Yuan Zhi-Jie, Chen Liang-Hui, and Lo Tien-Yu to go back to the event site, and reenvisioned their memories in front of the camera.
(中文介紹點選此處)
Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun__clip from Hsu Che-Yu on Vimeo.
Microphone Test_exhibition recording from Hsu Che-Yu on Vimeo.
A Telephone that Keeps on Ringing on the Living Room Table: After the audience walk into the exhibition space, they see a set of single person table and chair, and a phone that keeps on ringing is placed upon the table. They will hear a man’s voice mumbling words about “sending someone off” after they pick up the phone. The voice actually comes from Huang Guo-Jun’s novelist friend Yuan Che-Shen, who reads his own essay “Sending Off” on the television program “Swimming in the Sea of Books” hosted by Zhang Da-chun. The artist recorded parts of the dialogues, taking them out of their context and transplanting them in the telephone transmitter, just like sending off Huang Guo-Jun and witnessing his own death, or also like sending off the family memory in the video.
After Huang left the world for a year, Yuan also committed suicide. The newspaper used “Sending Off” as a pun in the title “Sending Off Turns into Parting Eternally.”