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2025
COLLABORATIONS
HONG ✕ RIJKSAKADEMIE
CATASTROPHISM
CHE-YU HSU
2025/04/18 - 06/14
This exhibition is the culmination of the Hong x Rijksakademie International Residency Project.
Artist Che-Yu Hsu’s work draws heavily on personal familial memories, and real social historical events such as siamese twins that surgically separated, his late grandmother’s house, the personal memories of the “Rice Bomber,” and the crime scene reconstruction of the “Chiang Nan Incident” political conspiracy. These faded traces of the past are brought back into the present by the artist through computer modeling, animation, video, and installation. Through fictional and altered narratives, real events are re-enacted to create a space where death becomes a starting point, and renewal follows destruction. With this rewritten history, HSU explores how personal and collective memories are formed and perceived.
The work is a continuation of the artist’s long-term collaboration with a forensic scanning team, their methods of digital reconstruction of identities a constant source of creative inspiration to Hsu. From recent media imageries of the bodies of children victims in war and disaster zones, structured light scanner data are collected, reassembled and transformed, combined with motion capture technology to create constructed scenes and child character models in the video work. These figures become copies of bodies left behind after disaster— bodies from which the soul has departed, bodies that serve as special vessels for the external transformation of memory; bodies in the form of children that symbolize unadulterated innocence, violence, and catastrophe.
Launched in 2023, the HONG × Rijksakademie International Residency Project is a collaborative initiative between the Hong Foundation and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in the Netherlands. It marks the first time a Taiwanese non-profit organization has partnered with the Rijksakademie on such a residency program. As one of the world’s leading artist-in-residence institutions, the Rijksakademie offers artists comprehensive support—from technical facilities to critical discourse. Through this partnership, artists who are Taiwanese nationals, based in Taiwan, or whose practice is strongly connected to Taiwan and are selected by the Rijksakademie may be eligible to receive a fellowship from the Hong Foundation. With the joint support of both institutions, the program aims to help artists develop their practice by engaging with international resources and expertise.
Catastrophism: Che-Yu Hsu solo Exhibition
HONG × RIJKSAKADEMIE International Residency Project
Artist｜Che-Yu Hsu
Date｜2025/04/18 - 06/14 (Mon. to Sat., 11 AM – 6 PM)
Venue｜Hong Foundation (12F, No. 9, Sec. 2, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei)
Organizer｜Hong Foundation
Supporting Partner｜Panasonic Taiwan
ARTIST
CHE-YU HSU
Che- Yu Hsu is an artist whose practice centers on animation and video, exploring the entangled relationships between media, history, and personal memory. He holds an MFA in Plastic Arts from Tainan National University of the Arts, and has participated in artist residencies at HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts, Belgium, 2019–2020), Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (France, 2020–2022), and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten Netherlands, 2022–2024). His work has been exhibited at Kunstenfestivaldesarts(2024), Theater der Welt in Germany (2023), the São Paulo Biennial (2021), the Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021), Sonsbeek (2020), Videonale in Bonn ( 2020), the Shanghai Biennale (2018), the London Design Biennale (2018), and the Asian Art Biennial (2017). His films have also been screened at major international festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and the New York Film Festival (NYFF).
Wan-Yin Chen is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on artistic confrontations with the ways history is written, represented, and constructed. Her recent projects include serving as research editor for Broken Spectre at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2017), guest critic for the Asian Art Biennial Phantas.ma/polis at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2021), and contributor to the forthcoming artist monograph published by the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands (2024). She also works as a screenwriter in collaboration with HSU Che-Yu on video-based works. Their projects have recently been presented at Kunstenfestivaldesarts (2024), Theater der Welt in Germany (2023), the São Paulo Biennial (2021), and the Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021). She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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