The first mourning exercise is a tribute to the artist’s deceased grandmother. The latest advances in medical research recognize the “spirit”, that immaterial and eternal aspect of every human being that consists of emotion or consciousness, as mere reactions within the nervous system – an understanding that denies the very existence of the soul. The artist recalls the experience of bodily perception in his grandmother's house and contemplates death and memory from a material perspective.

The second mourning exercise is based on the memories of a terrorist bomber and on his brother's suicide in the family home. The artist returns to the scene of the suicide and reenacts the event constituted by death. Meanwhile, he revisits the seashore and reenacts how he once practiced bomb-making and testing that was inspired by the suicide-prone United Red Army in Japan. By juxtaposing the suicide that struck his family with the sacrificial immolation of terrorist attacks, the artist presents death as a tension between the individual and the collective.

The third involves an animal-to-animal mourning ritual created by humans, where zoo trainers train animals to kneel and perform worship gestures to commemorate animals that have died due to warfare. A scriptwriter and a performer discuss how to reenact this mourning ritual and they attempt to conceive a mourning script about the animals. In this conversation, the relationship between “gestures” and “terror” is discussed.

These three mourning exercises deal with the body, space, and memory, and are part of an investigation into the “politics of death”. This project is finalized by working with a special scanning team that assists police authorities in the collection of forensic evidence. The team scans crime scenes as well as fragmented and decomposing bodies for identification. Using scanner technology, the three mourning exercises explore the representations, constructions, and alienations of memory and death as an intimate event.

Chen Wan-Yin (b.1988)

Chen is a writer and researcher. She was the editor of the Mandarin art magazine Art Critique of Taiwan (2011- 2012) and Artist Magazine (2014 -2017). And she participated in art projects as a writer and editor such as Broken Spectre (Taipei Fine Art Museum, 2017) and Phantas.ma/polis (Asian Art Biennial at National Taiwan Museum, 2021). Recent essays are published in Taipei Fine Arts Museum Modern Art, Voices of Photography. Her interests lie in artistic confrontations with the entanglements of coloniality in art historiography, meanwhile works as a scriptwriter in video works which had shown at São Paulo Biennial (2021), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021), Theater der Welt (2023). Currently, she is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary art history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Hsu Che-Yu (b.1985)

Hsu 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 participated in the Theater der Welt (2023), Bienal de São Paulo (2021), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021), Sonsbeek20→24 public program (2020), VIDEONALE.18 (2018), Shanghai Biennale (2018), London Design Biennale (2018), Asian Art Biennial (2017), and film festivals IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYFF New York Film Festival.

Gray Room

VR360 Installation
16’06’’
2022

Co-produced by Han Nefkens Foundation & Kaohsiung Film Archive VR FILM LAB

Inspired by my ailment and medical examination, I contemplate the construction of intimate memories, from bodily and spatial perceptions to neuroscientific imagination in this VR project.


It begins with a memory from my childhood: waking up in the middle of my sleep and finding myself sitting outside the house. It felt like everything became displaced. Recent two years, I have been bothered by unusual headaches. After medical examinations, I 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.

Blank Photograph

Single Channel Video
20’29’’
2022

Produced by Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains

A terrorist revisits the seashore where he practiced bomb-making and goes back to his home where he speaks a story about a suicidal scene.

From 2003 to 2004, Yang Ru-Men placed bombs on the city of Taipei more than ten times. Yet, none of the bombs was ignited. Yang’s action was later regarded as a struggle for farmers in the same vein of anti-neoliberalism and his sentence was mitigated. A few years after he was released from jail, his brother committed suicide at home.

In this work, we invite Yang Ru-Men to perform at two sites: the seashore and his house. At the seashore where he practiced bomb-making, he reenacts an operation and discusses the self-sacrifice resonance of the Japanese Red Army. In his house, he recalls a memory of a suicidal family member.

Zoo Hypothesis

Single Channel Video
31’33’’
2023

Supported by Theater der Welt & National Culture and Arts Foundation (Taiwan)

The video is about a scriptwriter and a performer having a conversation in an animal taxidermist’s studio. They attempt to come up with a performance, exploring the relationship between “gestures” and “horrors”.

The conversation revolves around two events from Japanese Taiwan during World War II. One is the memorial ceremony held in a zoo to commemorate animals that died during military operations. Animals such as elephants and orangutans were trained to kneel as a symbolic posture for mourning. The other reference is the 1944 massive animal execution in the Taiwanese zoo, intended to prevent civilian casualties caused by animals after the US military had bombed the cities. The unfortunate animals were then turned into taxidermy to preserve their movements and postures.

Organizers： Ministry of Education、Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts
Sponsor： National Culture and Arts Foundation