Connecting people through art 

We are pleased to announce the exhibition Zoo Hypothesis by artist Hsu Che-Yu (1985, Taiwan), in collaboration with LOOP Barcelona and Fundació Joan Miró.

Hsu Che-Yu was the 2020 winner of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Grant, in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró; Centre d'Art Contemporain, Genève; Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing; MoCA Taipei and ILHAM, Kuala Lumpur.

Zoo Hypothesis is the last work of a trilogy —along with Blank Photograph and Gray Room(both dating from 2022)— that was initiated thanks to the production grant, in collaboration with Fundació Joan Miró, where for the first time the artist worked with a forensic 3D scanning team specialised in the recreation of crime scenes.

Hsu’s work on video focuses on researching and re-examining historic moments and on the reconstruction of personal and collective memories. In Zoo Hypothesis (2023), the artist presents a dialogue between a scriptwriter and an actor while they are preparing a performance that explores the connection between certain gestures and the horror they evoke.

This dialogue is accompanied visually by digital reconstructions of the oldest zoo in Taiwan and its taxidermy workshop, architecturally generated using 3D scanning technology.

Hsu Che-Yu is an artist based in Taipei and Amsterdam. He completed a master’s degree at the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts of the Tainan National University of the Arts (Taiwan). He has participated in the Higher Institute for Fine Arts residency programme (Ghent, 2019–20) and at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing, 2020–22). In 2022, he began his two-year art residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Hsu Che-Yu creates animations, videos and installations that present the relations between memories and the media. What interests the artist is not just the history of events traceable through audiovisual media, but also the reconstruction and visualization of memories, be they private or collective.