Chih-Kang Hsu
Chih-Kang Hsu (b. 1988) is a Taiwanese artist whose works primarily involve photography, moving-image, and installation. Deeply informed by his architecture and set design background, he is interested in discovering spatial interpretation in an urban landscape. Chih-Kang uses photography as a material to explore illusion and reality in imagery by disrupting and destroying photographs physically. Furthermore, he tries to reveal the unfamiliar moments around us which are being ignored under the public’s habitual behaviours. His current research focuses on how memory shifts within monumentality and materiality. Through historical and political investigation, he delves into how monumental objects in public interfere with the individual and society’s memory, the creation or cancellation of false memories and untold truths.
Chih-Kang graduated with a BA in Architecture from Chung Yuan University in Taoyuan, Taiwan (2012) and then had experience as a photographer, film director and set designer. His works were shown in Taiwan (Taipei, 2014 & 2017), the USA (New York, 2019), and the UK (Glasgow, 2022).
How to make a new monument
The work questions the material authority of monumentality, as well as the fragility and manipulativeness of its core concepts. Societies tend to revise past history to conform to contemporary values. The events pointed to by the monument change with the context. How to Make a New Monument constantly rewrites the meaning of a monument while the audience redefines it.
I have been there
This work responds to the materialisation of images and the memory they carried. By scratching off the surface of the photo paper by hand, I have been there presents the fragility of image memory. The mixture of fictional and real photos makes it impossible for viewers to identify its actuality. However, the idea of the monument has become a deep collective memory in people’s minds, almost all the scenes seem real when reading the photos.
Ironically, erasing something fictionally will still lead us to the same interpretation.
Erasing becomes fixing.
