Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Starting from a gunman involved in a murder case, I seek to reflect the collective unconscious within society and politics through the gunman's multiple peculiar roles—a filmmaker, a killer, a gangster, and a patriot. In 1984, when Taiwan was still under Martial Law, a Taiwanese American writer Henry Liu was shot to death in his own house in the US by a Taiwanese assassin. Afterward, due to the intervention and investigation of the US government authorities, this case was eventually confirmed to be a political murder jointly committed by the Military Intelligence Bureau and the biggest mafia United Bamboo Gang in Taiwan, as the government paid the mafia to kill Henry Liu. The protagonist of this work, Wu Dun, is the assassin who fired the shot at the time. After the case was exposed, the Taiwanese authorities were pressured by the US, and Wu Dun was thus sentenced to life imprisonment. However, he was given amnesty and discharged from prison after six years. After he got out of prison, Wu Dun remained an important member of the United Bamboo Gang, and he established a film company as a producer with the support of his mafia influence, making several “wuxia films” – refers to specific traditional Chinese swordplay films. In this work, I revisited the film studio that was once used by Wu Dun and is now deserted to recompose the fragments of the political assassination and the scenes of wuxia films, and I cooperated with a 3D scanning team—their job is to provide forensic scanning service at crime scenes—to make a digital double of Wu Dun.

Hsu Che-Yu (b. 1985) is an artist based in Taipei and Amsterdam. Previously, Hsu obtained a master’s degree from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, Tainan National University of the Arts (Taiwan). Since 2019, he had participated in the residency program in HISK (Ghent, 2019–2020) and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing, 2020–2022). In 2022, he begins his two-year art residency in Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Hsu has solo exhibitions at Liang Gallery (Taipei, 2022), Vanguard Gallery (Shanghai, 2020), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2015), Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taipei, 2012), SAT Society for Arts and Technology (Montreal, 2012). He has participated in the Theater der Welt (Frankfurt, 2023), Bienal de São Paulo (2021), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021), Sonsbeek20?24 Quadrennial public program (2021), Techniques of Becoming (Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2021), VIDEONALE.18 (2021), Shanghai Biennale (2018), London Design Biennale (2018), Asian Art Biennial (Taichung, 2017), and film festivals IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023, 2022, 2020, 2018), NYFF New York Film Festival (2020)and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (2020, 2019, 2018). He was awarded the Videonale Award of the Fluentum Collection (Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2021), the Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Award (Han Nefkens Foundation, 2020), the Taishin Annual Grand Prize (Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture, 2016), and was a finalist for HUGO BOSS ASIA ART (2019).