Artist Ching-Chuan Hu’s practice probes the boundary between the digital and the real, seeking to translate ineffable personal sensations into a visual language that is fragmented yet lyrical. By working with glitches within digital tools, she disrupts the smooth narrative of technological perfection, confronting viewers with the unresolved gap between embodied perception and computational worlds—and questioning what immersion truly means. In this interview, we explore how she uses VR and 3D-scanning to articulate an inner landscape that feels at once intimate and estranged.
Hu Ching-Chuan, Unknown, 2020 © the artist.
SCREEN (SCR): Your work has incorporated digital elements from a relatively early stage. Did you begin your practice with moving images?
Ching-Chuan Hu (Hu): Not exactly. If I trace it back, I was simply the person who always picked up the camera as a child. My first work that involved digital elements wasn’t even video—it was a painting. It was a large oil painting I made in high school at Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School. I had searched online for ultrasound scans and baby photos. In the painting, I rendered a baby being held in two hands in a realistic style, while the surrounding areas were filled with the raw textures and visual data of ultrasound imagery. The numbers and English text from the ultrasound were printed out first, then stenciled manually onto the canvas. I think of that piece as my first attempt to merge so-called digital imagery with painting. I’ve always treasured it; it still sits in my family’s living room.
Hu Ching-Chuan, Uncanny Field, 2017 © the artist.
Practicing “Fragmented Perception”
SCR: You began working with digital image technologies fairly early. Could you talk about the conceptual development of Uncanny Field (2017)?
Hu: Before entering the graduate program in new media, I had already tried creating moving-image works. Looking back now, some of them feel like “low-tech VR”—a screen embedded in a head-mounted box that audiences had to lean into in order to watch.
When I actually started developing the VR work Uncanny Field, I held onto one core idea: I didn’t want to use a technological device merely according to its intended function. Mainstream expectations for VR tend to emphasize immersion—this fantasy of entering a perfected, optimized world. But what I wanted to examine was the “new reality” accelerated by technology and the conditions of contemporary life it produces.
During the pandemic, when everyone was confined, I decided to challenge myself to stay indoors for a hundred consecutive days. At some point—I can’t even remember which day—I stepped onto the balcony to stretch, and suddenly noticed the view and even the plants shifting subtly, as if parts of them were glitching or beginning to flow. It felt like a crack opening in reality. I was captivated by that moment, and it eventually became the inspiration for Unknown (2020).
Hu Ching-Chuan, That·This, 2018 © the artist.
SCR: So is this why your images often appear fractured?
Hu: I’m constantly experimenting with ways to visualize the world I mentioned earlier—those sensations that resist verbal description. Around 2015, when 3D-scanning technologies became more accessible, I began using them while intentionally keeping the scans imprecise. Rather than recreating reality one-to-one, I was more interested in how technical limitations and incompleteness could produce spaces that feel blurred, broken, and fused—closer to how my perception actually works.
For me, perception is always multi-layered, composed of overlapping moments. That’s why I rarely use linear storytelling. In Unknown, for example, viewers encounter shifts in the image at their own pace. The same goes for Rhythmic Loop (2016), the work you selected for screening—its non-linear form asks whether the kind of audio feedback we often dismiss as “noise” might itself become a subject. Beneath the soundscape, I whisper fragments from Sylvia Plath’s Crossing the Water. That looseness, that fractured structure assembled from shards, mirrors the perceptual texture that draws me in.
Hu Ching-Chuan, Above the Time, Work Documentation, 2020 © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei
A Work That Can Only Be Seen by Closing Your Eyes
SCR: Unknown is actually part of Above the Time (2020). I haven’t seen this work in person. Could you describe it?
Hu: It opened during the pandemic, so visitor numbers were tightly controlled. People had to register, and only one person could enter at a time, which meant only a limited audience experienced it. Above the Time is built around eye-tracking technology. A few years ago, this tech wasn’t common in everyday devices—mainly in medical or corporate contexts. Only dedicated eye-trackers could detect pupils in complete darkness. I contacted several companies before finally finding one willing to lend me the equipment.
The work grew from my desire to create something that could only be activated by “not seeing.” Closing one’s eyes is the most direct way to block the visual data streams that technological systems rely on. I believe high-tech environments inevitably seep into everyday life until they become unavoidable conditions—so I wanted to create a counter-situation.
Above the Time consists of two interconnected yet physically separated spaces. In the first, visitors encounter only a faint light in complete darkness. The moment they close their eyes, the room brightens and triggers a rain sound; when they open their eyes again, the light immediately disappears. During that brief instant of opening, a shadowy figure may flicker across the mirror—it is the viewer’s own reflection, paradoxically harder to see when the eyes are open.
Meanwhile, closing one’s eyes in the first space triggers image shifts in the adjacent room showing Unknown. The scene transitions from a white screen of falling rain to a metallic, reflective surface with moving visuals. But the viewer inside that second room has no idea what caused the transformation.
For me, many truths cannot be grasped through vision alone—they must be experienced through perception. The fact that you must close your eyes to fully enter the work is an interesting paradox, reminding us that “looking” is not the only way images come into being. When listeners hear rain with their eyes closed, different internal images arise within each person. And when they stand before the mirror, seeing themselves both present and strangely absent, questions of projection, selfhood, and disappearance naturally emerge.
Ideals and Digital “Stand-Ins”
SCR: Your work Remigrate (2020) explores childhood memories and spatial experience. How did you use technology to reconstruct such remembered spaces?
Hu: Remigrate began with my childhood imagination of Huaxin Street. Instead of completing a single full scan, I photographed each part of the street at different moments using photogrammetry and later stitched the fragments together. Through the smells, language, and the strangely familiar visuals of that street, I would imagine what my mother’s childhood environment might have felt like.
Hu Ching-Chuan, Remigrate, 2020 © the artist.
In this sense, “immersion” is never purely technological—it is built from our own memories, vision, and imagination. What VR creates is ultimately still a flattened image rather than a true three-dimensional world, yet we move through it as if it were real.
SCR: It seems your work also carries a deeper theme related to pursuing an ideal?
Hu: Yes. That comes from my mother’s family history. As Burmese Chinese, her family was always searching for a better place to live. She moved to Taiwan with her family at around sixteen, believing that returning to a Chinese-speaking environment would offer better prospects. Other relatives felt the U.S. held a more ideal future, so they migrated there.
This became the foundation of That·This (2018). The work reflects how my relatives—spread between Taiwan and the U.S.—maintain emotional ties through technology. I chose VR because I wanted to merge the American environment my grandmother longed to visit with the physical world she remained in. In a way, the work attempts to compensate for the loss she felt—a desire left unfulfilled because aging made long-haul travel impossible. But of course, I’m fully aware that such a digital substitute can never replace lived experience.
Remigrate became a turning point. It continues my existing practice while connecting my generation with the lived experiences of the one before us. In this work, I explore where technological evolution intersects with emotional life—how displacement and belonging recur across time. These questions take on different forms depending on the era, but they ultimately point to the same human concerns.
Hu Ching-Chuan, Awakening, 2020 © the artist.
SCR: Does this emphasis on the gap between the real and the digital also reflect your critique of technology?
Hu: Yes. Ever since Uncanny Field, I’ve been thinking about what we might relinquish—or unintentionally lose—once technology reaches a certain point of development. When a digital process allows us to achieve a goal, do we also abandon the need for physical, embodied action? These questions shape the contemporary conditions I try to articulate through my work.
The installation Awakening (2020) grew out of a moment of unease during a night spent away from home. I heard tapping and scraping against the window, and later realized it was caused by tree branches moving in the wind. Yet what I felt at the time was something closer to a muted resistance—a warning, or a message being delivered. That experience became the work’s point of departure.
If humans are no longer the agents who operate technology, but instead become receivers within it—if technology gradually turns into the environment itself—how do we recognize that our perception is being activated, interfered with, or even compelled to respond? —[SCR]
