Exhibition｜Resistance is Futile
October6 – November 3, 2017

Artists | Musquiqui Chihying
Curator | Shih-yu Hsu

Opening Reception｜Friday, October 6, 6 – 8 pm
Gallery Hour | M-F 1-6 PM or by appointment.

Artist-led Tour | Friday, October 6 at 7 pm
Weekend Schedule | October 7 & 8, 1-6 pm

Musquiqui Chihying, The Figure, 2017, Installation View, © Musquiqui Chihying.

Curatorial Statement

"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

--The Borg, Star Trek, First Contact.

In Resistance is Futile, artist Musquiqui Chihying creates multiple installations that present the various ways in which human beings resist the intrusion of the camera. His media-archaeological practice addresses medium specificity in its representation of image and moving image, and the rediscovery of factual knowledge, history and truth. In Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century, art historian Jonathan Crary points out that vision was relocated in the subjectivity of the “observer.” With the development of the optical apparatus, this observer had a sovereign and autonomous visual experience that had never before taken place in the history of vision, while his/her body waited to be regulated by this new experience. Therefore, there is always a tension between human beings and photographic apparatuses, between self-representation and the power of control, between seeing and being seen. The tension becomes the theme of works presented in this exhibition.

In the work The Figure, the artist selected photographic images of his friends in which they consciously or unconsciously covered their faces when they sensed the presence of the camera. Covering their faces in front of the lens, which makes subjects unrecognizable, becomes a straightforward sign of resisting the invasion. The resistance is nonetheless perpetually maintained in the images. In the images, the reason for the covering of faces is unknown, yet these unidentifiable subjects are still visible and present, leaving traces of their existence. Taken by the artist’s phone, the digital images are then reprinted and displayed on film by a now obsolete form of technology--the slide projector. The reversed process--the digital becomes the analog--is a signature gesture in the works of this exhibition, questioning the origin of the images and manipulating the lineage of technology.

The Camera series recreates, in HD video, historical scenes involving struggle over the representation of citizenship and identity in front of the camera. Camera (36) takes the perspective of Korean athlete Sohn Kee-chung in the 1936 Olympic games, when Korea was occupied by the Japanese Empire and he had to represent Japan at the games. In Leni Riefenstahl’s renowned documentary Olympics, Sohn covered his shirt with the Japanese icon Hinomaru (日の丸) by using the oak tree awarded to the champion, a resisting gesture as seen in The Figure. In contrast to Olympics, Camera (36) reverses the direction of the camera Riefenstahl deployed, imagining the working scene of Riefenstahl’s crew when Sohn was awarded the gold medal. Camera (16) re-staged the room where Chou Tzu-yu, the Taiwanese member of popular Korean girl band TWICE, had to apologize for the representation of her own national identity on a variety show. The video of Chou’s apology was widely circulated on social media the night before the 2017 presidential election of Taiwan, intensifying the current political and economic undercurrents between Taiwan, Korea and China.

In The Camera series, reversing the direction of the camera lens signified changes in the power dynamics of seeing, and the hierarchy of images--the high-resolution ones versus the poor images--was twisted. Viewers see the imaginary scenes presented in HD video, which are juxtaposed with the blurry images of the sites where the two events actually took place; while the real images of the incidents, whether the still image from Riefenstahl’s Olympics or the screenshot of Chou’s apology video on the YouTube, are re-made on 35mm films. The performativity of representation and the resistance to the camera in these incidents are not directly seen and can only be imagined through imagery in these different media. But in between a HD video, low-resolution images, and archive-like films, what will represent and be perceived as reality?

In the work Flash, the complex tension between human beings and cameras is brought into focus. The act of looking is sustained with the existence of light, while blinking light makes the message difficult to be read and interpreted. Until now, we observers, as Crary described, still do not conform to the standard formed by the endless images and moving images that visual machines produced in modern society. What would the camera say to the ready observers if it could talk to humans? When parts of human physicality and sensory experience are regulated by machines, can we escape from a future of the Borg? Or is resistance futile?