Tishan Hsu 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘 2023
The following review was originally published in the March/April 2024 print issue of ArtAsiaPacific.
Whether edifices, objects, or the people around us, things endow human life with stability and meaning. But as Korean-German theorist Byung-Chul Han has noted, “This terrestrial order is today being replaced by the digital order.” Unmoored from the physical world, we now find ourselves adrift in a sea of data and information, with the former mediated through screens and necessarily subordinated to the fleeting syntax of the binary number system—the basis of all computers, and, subsequently, most of our embodied experience. We might even ask whether we’ve inadvertently rendered ourselves (in Han’s words) “the material derivatives of information.”
This relationship between humans and technology has occupied American artist Tishan Hsu for the better part of four decades. As he summarized in a 2021 interview, “What are we really feeling here, interacting with all this stuff? There’s this kind of cognitive, emotional, psychological resonance going on between us as this organic body, and this screen, and it is affecting us and the culture, if not the world, in deeper and deeper ways.”
Embodied technology and the affective state of this interaction formed the conceptual centerpiece of his exhibition, “recent work 2023,” at the Secession in Vienna, which offered a certain, or perhaps unintended, ironic juxtaposition between the historical continuity of an institution celebrating 125 years of existence and a body of work dealing with the contingency and immateriality of the digital.
Tishan Hsu, recent work 2023, installation view, Secession 2023, photo: Oliver Ottenschläger
Inside the main gallery Hsu’s now familiar aesthetic syntax emerged: amorphous shapes; disembodied orifices, nipples, and ears; inky silkscreen prints; fleshy acrylic appendages; perforated metallic waves; and unexpected bulges—all in a palette of colors just as diverse. If today’s world is slipping into the ghostly twilight of the Information Age, then Hsu’s materialism reaffirms his commitment to the artwork as a body—idiosyncratic, enigmatic, and even disturbing.
At the far end, ears-screen-skin (Vienna) (2023), a digital image printed on self-adhesive foil and measuring six by ten meters, covered an entire wall, offering an immersive field of affective experience. Were the disembodied parts (things or non-things?) emerging from or submerging into the infinite flatness of the space of the virtual? As Han argues, our world today is fading away and becoming information, a point Hsu understood intuitively decades earlier—his ears, screen, and skin supplanting the materiality of the human body in favor of suspended fragments without purpose and without history.
Tishan Hsu, recent work 2023, installation view, Secession 2023, photo: Oliver Ottenschläger
Individual, collective, and cultural memory require modes of narration, but the digital is free from the burden of historical continuity, which is perhaps why Hsu’s works disorient. The process of transforming the body into information divests it of its meaning and coherence. An undifferentiated sameness persists. Works such as skin-screen: emergence (quadriptych) (2023) and skin-screen: revealed (quadriptych) (2023) are visually and linguistically iterative, much like the circumscribed numerical order of computational logic, with its repetitive binary of ones and zeros. This self-referential network of connections was perhaps best exemplified in the digitally animated video grass-screen-skin: zoom 2 (2023), endlessly looping at sixteen-minute intervals.
In an earlier book, Psychopolitics, Han wrote that “the digitalized, networked subject is a panopticon of itself,” an insight that helps us to understand the presence of (self) surveillance cameras in works such as camera-screen-skin (2023) and skin-screen: revealed (quadriptych) by Hsu, whose exploration of self-imposed confinement shares something of a critical kinship with Peter Halley, another 1980s New York artist who came of age during the birth of the internet. In fact, many of Hsu’s works on display in Vienna are illuminated from behind by painted fluorescent strips of color—a deliberate nod to Halley’s signature Day-Glo and the extent to which he (and Hsu himself) prefigured the technologically generated light of our ever-present screens.
Is there hope of stepping outside of the digital matrix? As the Secession exhibition demonstrated, one is always inside a body in Hsu’s art—its physicality, its imperfection, and its vulnerability a rejoinder to the clinical syntax of technological data. To every age its art, to every art its freedom.