in collaboration with Hsu Che-Yu since 2014,
developing scripts and co-directing projects
2-channel Video Installation, 35’58”
Commissioned by Kunstverein in Hamburg
Co-directed with Hsu Che-Yu
House a (2026) engages a plutonium separation plant from Taiwan’s secret nuclear weapons programme, which was terminated in 1988 following U.S. intervention and subsequently entombed in concrete. Within the assembly house of the Amis Sawuazhi community in Taoyuan—one of the communities affected by nuclear weapon material explosions—the artists invited a scientist who had participated in the programme to collaboratively stage the spatial erasure of the facility. Built inside the assembly house, the “inner house,” conceived as a site where memories of nuclear weapons are articulated, is dismantled on site and reassembled outside in the public square, a site marked by collective experience of contamination. The operation turns interior into exterior and stages the otherwise inaccessible core of the buried facility. Developed through site visits, archival research, interviews with former nuclear scientists and community members affected by radioactive contamination, as well as simulation and reenactment, the work does not represent the lost site but produces the conditions under which it can be thought, materialising absence as a spatial arrangement and framing memory as a structural relation, more than merely a visual image.
Multi-channel video installation, 12’54”
In collaboration with Hsu Che-Yu
A group of children twist their bodies and crawl slowly, encircling another child. They clutch pebbles and stones, tossing them as if to bury him. In the process, the buried child recounts a story about the evolution of Homo erectus. “Catastrophism” is a term used in evolutionary biology to describe pivotal moments when species evolution is reshaped by disaster. In the context of recent ecological shifts and a fractured global order, catastrophism can no longer be separated from technological systems. This work was inspired by a long-term collaboration with a 3D scanning team, whose tasks include scanning the bodies of victims at disaster sites and digitally reconstructing their identities. Through this collaboration, the artist seeks to explore the origins and formation of human rationality within the landscape of contemporary catastrophe.
The story of Homo erectus evolution in the video is adapted from Thomas Moynihan’s book Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History.
Video, 31’25”, 2023
Commissioned by Theater der Welt
In collaboration with Hsu Che-Yu
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. In addition to the dialogue between the two characters, both the Taiwanese Zoo and the zoo’s taxidermy studio were architecturally reconstructed using 3D scanning technology.
VR360 Installation, 16’06”
Co-production by Han Nefkens Foundation & Kaohsiung Film Archive VR FILM LAB
In collaboration with Hsu Che-Yu
Inspired by a man’s ailment and medical examination, we contemplate the construction of intimate memories, from bodily and spatial perceptions to neuroscientific imagination in this VR project. It begins with a memory from the man’s childhood: waking up in the middle of his sleep and finding himself sitting outside the house. It felt like everything became displaced. Recent two years, he has been bothered by unusual headaches. After medical examinations, he 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.
Video, 20’29”
Produced by Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains
In collaboration with Hsu Che-Yu
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. In 2003, 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. We cooperated with a 3D scanning team—their job is to provide forensic scanning service at crime scenes—to make a digital double of Yang Ru-Men. We made a digital scan of the architectural structure of Yang Ru-Men’s house. With these digital models, we reconstruct the bomb maker’s personal memories virtually.
Video Installation, 21’56”
Produced by Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains
In collaboration with Hsu Che-Yu
Starting from a gunman involved in a murder case, we 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 the genre of “wuxia film,” the story of the conflicts between a government and local gangsters has often been the main theme, along with a strongly nationalistic ideology. In this work, we 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 we 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.
Video Installation, 21’17”
Commissioned by 2019 Hugo Boss Asia Art
In collaboration with Hsu Che-Yu
We produce a digital-scan model and fiberglass cast of the body of the first Taiwanese conjoined twins. Through this process, we attempt to explore the workings of biopolitics and the functioning of one’s memory. The first conjoined twins underwent separation surgery in 1979 and the whole procedure was broadcast on TV. During that period, Taiwan was under martial law. In this way, this surgery was often interpreted as a metaphor for the relationship between Taiwan and China. Back in 1979, in order to prepare for the separation surgery, the hospital invited an artist to make a cast of the conjoined twins. The attempt to make a cast was however unsuccessful since it was difficult to control the babies during the moulding process. In this project Single Copy, we have re-casted the body of the now 43-year old Chang Chung-I, and also use 3D scanning technology to archive his body. The data from the archive are then used as sources for capturing memories from Chang’s earlier life. When Chang was 21 years old, he played a role in the movie, Falling Up Waking Down, portraying a teashop owner whose shop was inside a converted old bus. About two decades later, Chang is now 43 years old, and he has repeatedly thought about what it would be like to run that old bus-converted teashop. In real life, Chang is married with two kids, and this artwork overlaps his present life with the fictional setting.
Video, 40’31”
Commissioned by National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art
In collaboration with Hsu Che-Yu
Controversial news is visualized in detail through 3D animation, it’s all from a popular news company in Taiwan. We cooperate with the News animator and police officer. This video is about the artist’s brother’s family memories in the form of animation, and extend from these memories to two criminal cases that took place in the surrounding area: one teenager was murdered, which happened at an Internet café where the artist’s brother often used to go to in his adolescent years, and this event was made into an animation on the news. Another event also happened in his hometown; someone witnessed a dog wandering on the street, with a female’s head too rotten to be identified in its mouth. A police imagined and portrayed the female’s face before her death according to the shape of the skull. The two events were separately made into portraitures on public media—a manga illustration made with 3D software by news media, and the portrait of the victim drawn with pencil by the police. We visited the police who produced the head profile of the female, as well as the storyboard director who made the news animation. By exploring their graphic techniques, we attempt to construct the images of the artist’s brother’s memories.
Video, 15’19’
Commisioned by Broken Spectre at Taipei Fine Art Museum
In collaboration with Hsu Che-Yu
While suspended from a crane eight stories up in the air, a man performs a guitar solo. It’s a reenactment inspired by the particular relationship between subculture and political movement in 1990s Taiwan. In 1995, there was a human-shape balloon on the top of Chongxing Bridge in Taipei, and there was also the attempt of suspending all kinds of items in the air, such as washing machine, boiling hot pot, the statue of Chiang Kai-shek, and sex doll, trying to crash them to the ground. But the plan failed eventually; nothing was destroyed. Before everything started, it ended because of the self-explosion of the human-shape balloon. The same year under Chongxing Bridge, there was also a large scale fight. The people present there that day slashing each other with iron rod or sashimi knife. When we found the people invovled, however, they told us it was actually a fight between political factions. Re-rupture assembles two seemingly unrelated historical fragments: “People’s Taxi riot” and “Taipei Breaking Sky.” I invited five drivers who participated in the fight at the time to return to the event site, while hanging a guitarist Li Na-shao on the top of Chongxing Bridge to play music.
Video, 25’18”
In collaboration with Hsu Che-Yu
This work depicts private family memories of three close friends and attempts to portray what in fact belongs to the artist, or perhaps everyone’s memories through the memories of these others. Or perhaps, what is important is not whose memory it is, but the process that memory is constructed and viewed. We invited Yuan Zhi-Jie, Chen Liang-Hui, and Lo Tien-Yu to go back to the event site, and reenvisioned their memories in front of the camera. The Microphone Test series is named after writer Huang Guo-Jun’s work Microphone Test. Two months before Huang committed suicide, he wrote an essay in epistolary style titled“To Mother,” in which he expressed his intention to kill himself to his mother. The writing style is filled with black humor and expressive quality, but he killed himself two months after he wrote this letter, and he did not leave any suicide note.
