EXHIBITIONS /

Hsu Chia-Wei:
Always Ambiguous With the Passage of Time

Opens 21 November 2026 (Level 3)

The exhibition Hsu Chia-Wei: Always Ambiguous With the Passage of Time presents an array of works from the Taiwanese artist Hsu Chia-Wei on Southeast Asia and Taiwan. Informed by a range of historical sources and technologies, these works keenly probe traces of the archives, archaeological sites, scientific studies, and commonplace narratives and activate them through video, Virtual Reality, 3-D printing, and interactive AI. They are also staged in relation to soundscapes, interviews, drone footage, folklore, installations, and instruments of recordation such as drawing and the encyclopedia—all to further deepen, widen, and texture the already dense details of both history and everyday life. Scenes from Northern Thailand, colonial-period Indonesia, Malaya (now Malaysia and Singapore), and Taiwan are rendered vivid and mesmerising as references to both the past and the future. How they are translated visually and within environments draw attention to how they have been generated originally, are transposed in the present, and would speculate on possible cosmologies. They are finally closely tied to the ecology and geopolitics of their making, as seen in tangible marks derived from actual objects, on the one hand, and the abstractions of virtual lives in the digital world, on the other.

Hsu is an artist of copious imagination, wired to a heady mix of techniques and matrices of material across a range of sensible forms. He is attuned to the legacies of historical events, expressions of popular culture, interventions of machines, and the participation of the public that responds to his art. In this situation, the mythic and the quotidian, facts in the document and fictions in the storytelling come together to generate a different condition of reading as well as a community of interpreters within an exciting horizon of meanings. Such a contingency is paramount in the ethos and creative will of the artist, so that the process of making the art itself, for instance the filming of a scenario, is regarded as an event on its own that does not merely culminate in a completed production. This gesture is not only self-reflexive, it is recursive and reciprocal. It is in the very practice of, and not in perfecting, form where he comes in contact with, or in fact invites, various forces and interests, which in turn become the agents of his art. The many species of the universe of the local mesh with the elements of aesthetic devices. Stimuli from nature or culture like the mammal tapir, a puppet in a town, a house in the village, the spy and the spectator, and opium, to name only a few of Hsu’s characters, become impulses for thoughtful action, an elaboration, or an intervolvement. 

Hsu thus is decisive in his curation of materials, methodical in how he parses them and how he presents them within an exhibition. But he keeps the space open for things to fall through, slip out, come back, move away. This is what the “ambiguity” in the title of the exhibition alludes to: the uncertainty in the mingling and in the intuition. Within such an ambiguity is the question of time, which assumes many guises. It could be the linear time of history or the cyclical time of ritual. It could be the modern time of art or the contemporary time of ecology. Ambiguity and passage, collected under the sign of always-incipient and yet also always-punctual time, inflect the projects of the artist. He would dilate and protract time, return to a conjured past, immerse it in a melancholic ongoingness, or prospect its imminent dimensions with the equipment of the now and the new. In this regard, the institution of the museum recurs as a motif and is contemporaneoulsy a deconstruction, which thus holds exhibitions and the logic of representation, visibility, and capture to account. The zoo and the church, loci of similar congregation, prove to be cognates in this aesthetic and social inquiry. 

To gather these pieces in Kuala Lumpur is important. The exhibition offers an intense mindfulness about the oeuvre of Hsu dedicated to Southeast Asia. In doing so, it complicates the overinvestment in the modernities of nation-states and nationalisms, which form the basis of internationalism and regionalism, of international contemporary art and regional identity. By arguing for a common exhibitionary, installative, and virtual space to be inhabited, he summons the islands, forests, coasts, mountain ranges, weathers, and waterways of Southeast Asia to breathe the atmosphere of a shared sensorium—as well as the illicit circulation of something as granular as drug or as elusive as deer. The artist thus tempts the public to at once re-imagine the world and to re-world the imagination in memory and algorithm. It is in the premises of the exhibition that the experiment of form becomes the experience of place, embodied and inspired, in time passing—and always ambiguously. (Patrick Flores, Curator)