Echoes of the Doppelgänger
Guerrilla Collective009
Program of 2025.5
空白相片
Blank Photograph
20min, 2022, Taiwan
Hsu Che-Yu
This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin.
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, Hsu Che-Yu invites 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. The artist 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. Hsu made a digital scan of the architectural structure of Yang Ru-Men’s house. With these digital models, the artist reconstructs the bomb maker’s personal memories virtually.
事件现场制造
The Making of Crime Scenes
22min, 2020, Taiwan
Hsu Che-Yu
This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin.
Starting from a gunman involved in a murder case, The Making of Crime Scenes seeks 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 Liu. In the end, the Taiwanese government negotiated with Liu’s family, who signed a non-disclosure agreement, part of which prohibited the revelation of the case in the form of cinema.
副本人
Single Copy
21min, 2019, Taiwan
Hsu Che-Yu
This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin.
Hsu Che-Yu produce a digital-scan model and fiberglass cast of the body of the first Taiwanese conjoined twins. Through this process, Hsu attempts 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, Hsu Che-Yu has 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 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.
重新破裂
Re-rupture
15min, 2017, Taiwan
Hsu Che-Yu
This work is a cooperation with the long-time collaborator, scriptwriter Chen Wan-Yin.
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 the artist found the people invovled, however, they told Hsu it was actually a fight between political factions.
Re-rupture assembles two seemingly unrelated historical fragments: "People's Taxi riot" and "Taipei Breaking Sky." Hsu Che-Yu 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.
About the Director
Hsu Che-Yu 许哲瑜
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 Che-Yu works as an artist who primarily creates animations, videos, and installations that feature the relations between media and memories. What matters to the artist is not simply the history of events traceable through media, but also the construction and visualization of memories, be they private or collective.
Hsu has solo exhibitions at Hong Foundation (Taipei, 2025), Vanguard Gallery (Shanghai, 2025, 2020, 2016), ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts (Brussels, 2024), ILHAM Gallery (Kuala Lumpur, 2024), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, 2023), Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2023), MOCA Taipei (2023), Vernacular Institute (Mexico City, 2023), Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taipei, 2023,2012), Liang Gallery (Taipei, 2022), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2015), SAT Society for Arts and Technology (Montreal, 2012). He has participated in the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels, 2024), Theater der Welt (Frankfurt, 2023), Bienal de São Paulo (2021), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021), Sonsbeek20→24 Quadrennial public program (2021), VIDEONALE.18 (2021), Shanghai Biennale (2018, 2012), London Design Biennale (2018), Asian Art Biennial (Taichung, 2017), and film festivals IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023, 2022, 2020, 2018) and NYFF New York Film Festival (2020). 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).
About the Script Writer
CHEN Wan-Yin 陈婉尹
Wan-Yin Chen is a PhD candidate in modern and contemporary art history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research project focuses on the media aesthetics of East Asian artists and explores the criticality of media art practices in relation to the culturally specific media ecology shaped by colonial experiences and folklore traditions. She is the recipient of the Government Scholarship for Studying Abroad from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan (four-year funded). She was the editor of the Mandarin art magazine Art Critique of Taiwan (2011- 2012) and Artist Magazine (2014 -2017). And she participated in curatorial projects as a writer and editor in Broken Spectre (Taipei Fine Art Museum, 2017) and Phantas.ma/polis (Asian Art Biennale at National Taiwan Museum, 2021). Her interests lie in artistic confrontations with the entanglements of coloniality in contemporary art, meanwhile works as a scriptwriter in video works which had shown at the São Paulo Biennial (2021), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021), Theater der Welt (2023).