Rising Stars: Meet Chihyang Hsu

Today we’d like to introduce you to Chihyang Hsu.

Hi Chihyang, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I am a multidisciplinary artist and workshop organizer at a private museum. In 2019, I came to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in photography. The pandemic occurred in the middle of the first semester, and I struggled mightily to create work and make friends in a place where I had few acquaintances. My school and volunteer work were both suspended. Consequently, I began to view community-building as an artistic endeavor. Inspired by the drawing game cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), I emailed my friends a photograph and asked them to interpret it. I opted to continue the partnership since I enjoyed it. As a result, a group of artists and I teamed up with a Chinatown senior center to host an event on food art. Before the event, we visited with the elders to learn about their traditional foods. Based on the conversations, each artist brought a home-cooked dish to the event, and we shared food-related experiences and ideas. Moreover, communication and perception are recurring themes in my artwork, and I have volunteered for years in many organizations for people with visual impairments. Working closely with the visually impaired has heightened my awareness of the significance of touch, which is often taken for granted. I began a photography project called Touch is Love using a thermal camera to capture the surface temperature of urban life last year.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
Because maintaining an art career in a different culture needs a great deal of dedication and communication, the journey was incredibly challenging. I was required to discover unspoken rules and make prudent selections. The graduate school where I initially studied could have been more straightforward about their decision to discontinue the program due to Covid-19. After hearing about the program’s closing, I was undecided between returning to Taiwan and moving to a new school, which would have increased my financial load. Besides this, my tendency to second-guess causes certain difficulties. My art involves members of several cultures. Therefore, I must remain continually conscious of my objective. If the work is “of the subject” rather than “for the subject,” it is possible to create exploitative art recklessly. It can be difficult to let go of a seemingly good idea that could result in poor work; communicating with others helps me avoid this problem.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My primary jobs are photography and community events. I create a personal experience for the audience rather than an object when I produce art. I am proud of the interactive components and combination of comedy and seriousness that challenge preconceptions in my artwork. The Touch is Love series has a psychedelic appearance, but it also includes references to consumer-grade technology and vision styles. The heat-based visuals provide the spectator with an alternate visual language to navigate. Once, a review from a photography magazine stated: “Your images have multiple aesthetic and conceptual aspects. And I admire how you use a very personal experience to examine what that many of us have in common: the capacity to see. In other words, you are requesting that the audience set aside everything they take for granted about their vision and recognize that there are various ways of experiencing the world through this shared experience of gazing.”

In my other untitled interactive work, I guided multiple groups of people through a 17,600-square-foot Boston warehouse that I had vandalized with UV paint. The paint is visible only under UV irradiation and does not glow in the dark. Participants were given UV flashlights and instructed to search the rooms for my writings on the walls. The works discuss perception, time, location, and room sounds. Since then, I’ve become the local UV light artist.

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
I have created artwork and organized events in Los Angeles, New York City, and Boston, among other cities. Every location has its history and characteristics, which I endeavor to capture. Along the way, I acquire excellent listening skills that enhance my ability to communicate with people from diverse backgrounds.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://hsuchihyang.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hsu_chihyang/