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This solo exhibition at CCA Tbilisi presents a project by the Taiwanese artist-writer duo Hsu Che-Yu and Chen
Wan-Yin.
Catastrophism is a term in evolutionary biology describing pivotal moments when the course of species
evolution is disrupted by disaster. In the context of recent ecological shifts and a fractured global order,
catastrophism has become inseparable from technological systems. Drawing on their long-term collaboration
with a forensic 3D-scanning team, whose work includes scanning victims’ bodies at disaster sites, the artists
adopt scanning data to construct a video installation featuring toddler-like figures, probing how reason and
unreason are shaped within contemporary catastrophic landscapes.
Alongside the video installation, they present Zoo Hypothesis (2023), commissioned by Theater der Welt 2023,
a thirty-one-minute video that stages a conversation between a scriptwriter and a performer across two sites: an
animal taxidermist’s studio and a zoo. Their dialogue examines the relation between gesture and horror,
anchored in two events from Japanese-occupied Taiwan during World War II: a memorial ceremony held in a
zoo, where animals such as elephants and orangutans were trained to kneel in mourning for those fallen in war;
and the 1944 mass killing of zoo animals in Taipei, ordered to prevent civilian casualties during U.S. air raids.
Many of these animals were later preserved as taxidermy, suspended in a strange afterlife. By using scanning
technologies to replicate spaces and bodies, the work explores technology’s role in archiving trauma, memory,
and corporeality. At its core lie the fraught relations between humans and animals, matter and memory.
Their collaboration has been shown at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels (2024), Theater der Welt, Frankfurt
(2023), São Paulo Biennial (2021), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021), Videonale Bonn (2020), Shanghai
Biennale (2018), London Design Biennale (2018), and Asian Art Biennial (2017); and at festivals including the
International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), the New York Film Festival (NYFF), and Taiwan International
Documentary Festival (TIDF).
Hsu Che-Yu is an artist whose practice centers on animation and video, exploring entanglements between media,
history, and personal memory. He holds an MFA in Plastic Arts from Tainan National University of the Arts
(Taiwan) and has participated in residencies at HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts, Belgium, 2019–2020), Le
Fresnoy—Studio national des arts contemporains (France, 2020–2022), and the Rijksakademie van beeldende
kunsten (Netherlands, 2022–2024).
Chen Wan-Yin is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on artistic confrontations with the ways history is
written, represented, and constructed. Projects include research editor for Broken Spectre, which revisited
subversive art in 1990s Taipei (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2017); guest critic for the Asian Art Biennial
Phantas.ma/polis (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2021); and contributor to an artist monograph (Van
Abbemuseum, 2025); current phd candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
See more about the artists:
Hsu Che-Yu → https://www.hsucheyu.com/
Chen Wan Yin. → https://research.vu.nl/en/persons/wan-yin-chen/
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