Microphone Test—Hsu Che-yu Solo Exhibition

Date：2015/09/26 – 2015/11/15

Venue：Gallery F

 

 

 

 

Hsu Che-yu specializes in using video installations and new media art to examine media abnormalities, and through the use of interfaces, reflections on the cross dialectics between reality and fiction are conducted. The title of the exhibition is inspired by the short prose collection, Microphone Test, by Huang Kuo-chun before he passed away, with hybrids of technology and life presented by the author in the style of black humor. These beings of exclusion in the form of human figure are fed by televisions, computers, surveillance monitors, and a medley of other equipment, resulting in various bizarre and deformed faces.

 

Microphone Test—Hsu Che-yu Solo Exhibition is based on this context, with a story about memories narrated by the artist, recounting the tales of family memories and how such memories are constructed and perceived.

Using family memories of Yuan Zhi-jie, Cheng Liang-hui, and Lo Tien-yu, who are good friends with the artist, their oral recounts of their memories are then rewritten, deconstructed, and reconstructed by Chen Wan-Yi, who started off as a complete stranger to them. During this process, this stranger also subtly embedded her personal memories into the narratives. The deconstruction and reconstruction then resulted in a script that was used by the artist for an animated documentary, with his three friends invited to reenact their memories in front of a camera.

 

People that were filmed are replaced by fictional characters that the artist has created with outlines in Microphone Test—Hsu Che-yu Solo Exhibition, with these fictional characters integrated in the real setting appearing in the video. However, is this form of reality based on the sense of reality of those doing the reminiscing? Or is it based on the rewriter’s form of reality? Maybe it is the reality of the person remaking the stories on video? When reality is intruded by fiction and thoughts about “reality” is turned, the question being raised by the artist is then turned into a dialectical approach.

In the prose collection, Microphone Test, by Huang Kuo-chun, the author treated “death” as “effects for making an exit”. Similarly, these performance-based segments are expressions of the inquiries stemming from deep within. In Microphone Test—Hsu Che-yu Solo Exhibition, the suicide of the grandfather from one of the artist’s friends is also used to spark dialogues between them via art.

 

As stated by the artist, perhaps this exhibition is not about the specific memories of someone; it is about the process of how memories are constructed and perceived.