Multitude and Copies
In the summer of 2025, Hsu Che-yu and Chen Wan-yin published the artist book Aberrant Archive, reflecting on their collaborative practice since 2015. By disrupting the chronological order of a decade’s creative trajectory, this book allows the concepts and images of each project to echo and illuminate one another. Just like serialized chapters finally gathered into a single volume, the relationships between the works come sharply into view. Memory may be aberrant, yet it unfolds with striking legibility.
Beginning around 2010, Hsu’s practice set out by critiquing how news media constructs the “Society of the Spectacle”. The camera in these works often gazed from a distance like paparazzi, or zoomed in with the composed framing of news reportage. Over the past decade, however, the figures in Hsu Che-yu and Chen Wan-yin’s works no longer mimic journalistic imagery. Instead, the camera turns directly toward the subjects themselves, drawing on their memories to narrate lives lived in proximity to violence, death, and the endurance of grief. With the movement of the lens, the images touch upon visual details with the texture of a novel, yet traverse the body inside and out like science fiction—leaping skyward, to drift over the world below, a moment of trance that feels both alien and alluring. From anonymity to named figures; from flat, spasmodic stylized animation to volumetric yet fragmented, colorless digital modeling; from mocking the media’s consumption of others’ suffering to a sustained, magnified attention to lived experiences and personal storms of life. Yet even as diverse individuals appear across the works, in their latest exhibition Catastrophism (2025), the figures remain mere replicas: unnamed, interchangeable, demonstrating how humanity as a collective is subjected to disasters produced by ecological evolution and geological transformation.
Through the exhibitions Three Episodes of Mourning Exercise (Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, 2023) [1] and Catastrophism (Hong Foundation, 2025), together with their writing on “Spinal Catastrophism” in Aberrant Archive, I come to perceive more clearly the internal tension that interlinks sixteen works produced over the past decade. This tension unfolds across concerns with the Society of the Spectacle and the construction of memory; the exteriorization of perception and emotional compensation; the nervous system and synesthesia; and, ultimately, the inescapable catastrophe bound to the specifically human biological condition of the upright spine.
The nervous system’s perception of the world is, essentially, a simulation. The body functions as a simulator that does not perceive reality directly but interprets the external world through an internally constructed model. Sensory perception, whether tactile or visual, is therefore a kind of neural fiction. And this fiction pertains not only to space, but to time as well. Each organism experiences time differently, interpreting it through seasonal shifts or the alternation of night and day, which means that its neural structure can be understood as a unique internal time machine. In spinal catastrophism, the world is not a fixed external reality, but an inner projection – an interpretive reconstruction shaped by the nervous system.
Departing from a visceral critique of media abuse, the artists’ practice gradually shifted toward ethical questions of narration and representation, and more recently submerged itself in a cybernetic perspective, reshaping discussions of human perception, neuroscience, and multispecies ecology. This trajectory appears to edge toward a form of pessimistic determinism. The works move from an outward-facing mode of critique and attribution of blame to an inward turn of projection and self-interpretation—a dialectical reversal of viewpoints from exterior to interior.
Gradually, in encountering the works of Hsu Che-yu and Chen Wan-yin, the eye is compelled to apprehend what cannot be seen. The necessity of form, of color, of texture recedes into an indistinct and secondary backdrop, as vision slides between inside and outside. Instead, what comes to the fore is how one senses lives that no longer exist, the constant imminence of death, and the ability to hear memories not yet fully articulated; how one becomes alert to the man-made disasters and natural catastrophes we have collectively allowed to unfold. This, for me, constitutes the “internal projection” that emerges most forcefully in their recent works. [3]
Gray Room in Three Episodes of Mourning Exercises, VR installation, Dimensions variable, 2022.
Writing, Spacing, and Narrator
I first encountered Hsu Che-yu’s work through two exhibitions in 2011: the FLU-FATIGUE video screening (Taipei Contemporary Art Center, curated by Jun-Jieh Wang) and the solo exhibition The Nameless Man (Taipei Digital Art Center). The works on view—Breaking News of Spectacle (2009), Day-to-Day (2011), and The Perfect Suspect (2011)—are among Hsu’s early signature pieces. These video works, presented alongside prints and lightbox installations, feature Hsu’s close friends and girlfriend as performers. Appearing across different scenes, they embody “nameless people” whose identities remain deliberately unspecified. Their actions consist of short, repetitive gestures lasting only a few seconds, or moments frozen mid-action. Slaps, dry heaving, and sudden eruptions of violence or obscenity surface unexpectedly, lending the works an overall tone that is unruly, grotesque, and darkly comedic. Largely eschewing layered narrative structures, this series of works focus on parodying and satirizing the formulaic yet highly inflammatory news animations—specifically, the Action News by Next TV.
Hsu Che-yu, The Perfect Suspect, 2011.
In 2015, Hsu Che-yu’s solo exhibition Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun presented his first collaboration with Chen Wan-yin, marking a shift in both working method and subject matter. The first change lies in the performers. While the same group of friends continued to appear in the works, they no longer acted as others, but instead, appeared under their real names, presenting their own life stories. The “nameless people” disappeared, and fiction and reality overlapped within this work. The second change was the presence of a narrator—Chen Wan-yin. Crucially, Chen did not personally know these friends, which provided a necessary distance for the artists to articulate their stories. The third change was the entry of others’ writing. Huang Guo-Jun’s (1971–2003) epistolary essay To Mother, written two months before his suicide, was woven into the narrative of Microphone Test, creating yet another layer of distance. “Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun is a video letter to Huang Guo-Jun.” [4] In the exhibition space, the voice emanating from a telephone receiver is a reading of Send-Off (1994), a prose piece by Huang’s close friend, novelist Yuan Zhe-sheng(1966–2004). It serves both as a valediction for Huang and as a haunting rehearsal for Yuan’s own impending suicide.[5]
Within the narrating and descriptive voiceover, lives that are no longer present are rendered with a palpable temperature of existence, reflecting how death lies latent in every moment of life. Words written prior to death, publicly foretelling the end, serve as the footprints of one’s journey toward the void—the very things the living most tenderly hold onto after death arrives. At the same time, these writings also serve as means through which those of us who have not experienced death come to imagine it. Addressed to readers across different times, such texts repeatedly extend their lives, generating countless interpretations as if revived again and again. In this regard, it is difficult not to recall Jacques Derrida’s proposition. Derrida argues that writing exists both in the moment of speech and after it, and that the “after” signifies the absence of the speaker, leaving only writing behind. Each act of writing thus appears as a preparation for death—an understanding that also speaks to the essence of the archive. Writing forever awaits its form, and meaning continues to defer and differ (différance) throughout this process. Writing is a trace cast outward from the mind, an act of spacing. Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun situates itself within the spaces specialized through Huang Guo-Jun’s writing. In doing so, it accompanies—or shares—the ethical weight borne by the narrator, establishing a point of anchorage from which the work leaps toward the real.
As mass media recedes and writing enters, narration comes to the foreground as the structuring principle of Hsu Che-yu and Chen Wan-yin’s works. In the works following Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun, death continues to haunt the practice: Single Copy (2019), The Making of Crime Scenes (2021), Lacuna (2018), Blank Photograph (2022), Zoo Hypothesis (2023), and the exhibition Catastrophism (2025). A life-threatening surgical operation; the assassination site of the Chiang Nan case; an anti-WTO bomber recalling a self-inflicted death within his family; professional mourners enacting “substitutive grief”; animals performing gestures of mourning in a zoo memorial ritual; children with indistinct faces, clustering together beneath the shadow of war—these scenes recur across the works. Here, images operate as interfaces, oscillating between the materialities manifested through scanning and digital modeling. In this movement, they hold open up spaces spatialized by writing—an extending spacing itself.
Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2015.
Non-dream and Plasticity
This is far from a half-conscious daydream. After countless iterations over the years, each reappearance of the non-dream becomes a personal experiment with the body. I can now clearly distinguish it from ordinary dream imagery: even if typical dreams seem to have sound and vision, I can rationally identify them afterward as mental constructs. Unlike ordinary dreams – which may feature sound or vision but dissolve under rational scrutiny – the non-dream retains a material presence. Though conjured by the nervous system, this illusion is experienced as a real hallucination. [6]
After Single Copy, body models have gradually become a central element in the works of Hsu Che-yu and Chen Wan-yin. These appear both as digital models—produced through scanning and rendering within video—and as physical casts molded from human bodies and installed in the exhibition space. The physical casts are usually a single leg (from calf to foot) or a single hand (from palm to forearm), placed around or behind the projection screen, as if prosthetic bodies extending from the images into the physical realm.[7] Developing from the concerns raised in Lacuna—including the drawing techniques and storyboarding logic of Next TV’s Action News, the termination of fetal life, and alternative destinies across parallel timelines—Single Copy turns instead to the lives of the conjoined twins Chang Chung-jen (1976–2019) and Chang Chung-i (1976–). Their lives appear as mutual “copies” that ultimately become a “single copy,” as the title suggests. Since Single Copy, the recurring bodily models in the exhibition space are no longer merely inorganic objects. Rather, they signify the remainders of life: residues left behind once vitality has receded, shells emptied through the erosion of living force, and survivors abandoned in the world by the dead—those who continue to exist as what the deceased has left behind.
Installation View of Single Copy, 2019.
The notion of the “model” does not begin with Single Copy. In Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun, sculptural casts and corresponding animations already appeared in the exhibition space, suggesting a liminal temporality in which the model is “about to move” while animation is “about to come to rest.” In the later VR work Gray Room (2022), the exhibition space contains no sculpture, no physical model, and no projection. Only through a headset does a 360-degree virtual environment emerge: digitally modeled figures, houses, and streets. Viewers are enveloped in a gray-white, muddy world, their viewpoint hovering slightly above adult height, while the visual field is orchestrated through slideshow-like sequences of stillness. As they look around this modeled space, they listen to Yang Ru-men recount Hsu Che-yu’s recent experiences of diplopia (double-vision) and “non-dream” states, alongside fragments of domestic life. Within the seemingly empty exhibition space of Gray Room, the plasticity of the model advances further. The model no longer serves merely as a metaphor for the inscription or fixation of memory, but points instead toward neuroplasticity—the nervous system’s capacity to operate memory and adapt to its environment.
In viewing Gray Room, the motionless viewer loses sight of their own body, hovering over a silent, muddy expanse where temporal jumps and lingering afterimages coexist. Occupying an omniscient yet unstable position, what appears is at once knowable and unknowable—neither dream nor non-dream, neither fully alive nor fully dead. In this sense, Gray Room approaches these perceptual conditions with precision, extending the conceptual role of the model developed across the artists’ earlier oeuvre.
The latest exhibition Catastrophism returns to characteristics associated with the earlier stage of the “unnamed.” The exhibition space surrounds viewers with multi-channel projections, presenting images of groups of children under the conditions of contemporary warfare and disaster.[8] Prior to Catastrophism, infants and children appeared briefly in several works, portrayed by Hsu Che-yu’s nephew with an explicitly named presence. In Catastrophism, however, the nephew, Hsu Li-wen, appears only through voice, serving as the narrator. The narration cites passages describing moments of death from Lou Yi-Chun’s novel Kuang Chao Ren, alongside notes and associations drawn from Thomas Moynihan’s Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (2019).[9] Within the vacuum-like silver-gray world of the images, the children’s faces are blurred, their identities unnamed and indistinguishable. They seem to play and support one another, yet also to tease and bully each other. Their actions are at once life-sustaining and lethal, carrying an uncanny sense in which care and violence remain inseparably entangled.
After a series of works closely detailing experiences of living in proximity to others’ deaths, Catastrophism acts as a recursive turn toward the earlier ‘spectacle’ series—through its subject matter, performative relations, and multi-channel exhibition format—while simultaneously bridging to the ‘non-dream’ experience articulated in in Gray Room. In doing so, it exposes Spinal Catastrophism as a form of collective, inescapable fate that confronts humanity—a speculative reflection and tentative response to the long-standing illusions of spectacle.
For me, Catastrophism stands as a retrospective gesture by Hsu Che-yu and Chen Wan-yin, looking back upon a decade of collaborative practice. Puppets, models, narrators, memory, death, and mourning remain the core concepts that have persisted since Single Copy. Ten years after Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun, at a moment when warfare has become capillary and a world war seems to approach a critical threshold, it is perhaps ironic that speaking once again of named, individualized deaths becomes the illusion most distant from death itself.
Confronted with the ongoing global conflicts, invasions, and defenses of the present, the question becomes how we might—under the notion of synesthesia triggered by the nervous system—learn to feel grief without misrecognition, and thereby to know life and death without error. It is here, perhaps, that memory begins to find its belonging: no longer aberrant, but finally becoming clear and discernible within its own archive. —[SCR]
/Translated by Shih-yu Hsu
Hsu Che-yu, The Unusual Death of a Mallard, 2020.
[1] The works on display in Three Episodes of Mourning Exercisesinclude Gray Room (2022), Blank Photograph (2022), and Zoo Hypothesis (2023). For more details, please visit the exhibition website.
[2] Chen Wan-yin, Hsu Che-yu, (2025). “A Few Exercises in Mourning and Notes on Catastrophism”, Aberrant Archive, dmp editions, Taipei, p342.
[3] Quote from exhibition texts of Catastrophism.
[4] ”Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun is a video-letter addressed to the late writer. Through a dialogue with Huang’s writings, the artist traces the intimate, familial memories of three close friends. In recounting the memories of others, the work seeks to uncover memories that may also belong to the artist, or perhaps to us all. Perhaps it is not about whose memory it is, but about how memory is constructed and how it is seen.” Chen Wan-yin, Hsu Che-yu, (2025). Aberrant Archive, dmp editions, Taipei, p20.
[5] The voice belongs to the late writer Yuan Zhe-Sheng, a friend of Huang Guo-Jun. The excerpt comes from a television program titled Voyage Through Books, hosted by Chang Ta-chun, in which Yuan discussed his prose piece “Farewell”. Hsu and Chen recorded and edited several fragments of Yuan’s voice, reassembling them and inserting them into the telephone. The voice appears to speak not only to Huang Guo-Jun’s death, and perhaps Yuan’s own, but also to the act of bidding farewell to the familial memories portrayed in the film. A year after Huang Guo-Jun’s death, Yuan Zhe-Sheng passed away by suicide. The newspapers reported his passing with a headline that played on the title of his work: “Farewell becomes final parting.” from Microphone Test: A Letter to Huang Guo-Jun, Hsu Che-yu, (2013).
[6] Chen Wan-yin, Hsu Che-yu, (2025). “A Few Exercises in Mourning and Notes on Catastrophism”, Aberrant Archive, dmp editions, Taipei, p341.
[7] Several concepts of ‘prosthesis’ can serve as references for the ‘model limbs’ in the works of Hsu Che-yu and Chen Wan-yin: for instance, Jacques Derrida’s view of writing as a prosthesis of memory and technics as a prosthesis of the human; or David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s identification of ‘narrative prosthesis’ as a typical problem in the depiction and narration of physical impairments within the Western literary tradition.
[8] According to the artist, the work Catastrophism was partially inspired by the ‘dwarfs’ in the circus from German director Werner Herzog’s film Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970). Consequently, some movements carry a circus-like quality (such as magic, hypnosis, and levitation). For this reason, the child-like figures in the video might also be interpreted as adult dwarfs. From the article.
[9] One of the videos in the exhibition Catastrophism depicts a child buried in a mound of earth, while three other children attempt to dig him out. However, the child being unearthed continuously murmurs a narrative about death. This narrative primarily references Luo Yi-jun’s novel Kuang Chao Ren, which provides a fictionalized account of writer Yuan Zhe-sheng’s decision to commit suicide. Hsu Che-yu references a specific passage for the video: ‘When one dies, one does not truly perish; instead, they remain alive within the very moment of their death. In this instant, they experience all kinds of different ways of dying in a state of eternal recurrence.’ From the article in note 8.
*This article was sponsored by the “Phenomenal Writing—Visual Arts Criticism Project” of the National Culture and Arts Foundation and the Winsing Arts Foundation in 2024.
