Chia-Wei Hsu
Spirit Writing
The final work in the Marshal Tie Jia series (of which Turtle Island is in the KADIST collection), Spirit Writing features the Marshal in conversation with Chia-Wei Hsu, by way of a ritual involving the Marshal’s divination chair. Marshal Tie Jia is a frog god, who was born in a pond in Jiangxi, China, before fleeing to Matsu Island off the coast of Taiwan during the Cultural Revolution after his temple was destroyed. Spirit Writing attempts to reconstruct the original temple using 3D modeling software, operated in real time as Hsu asks the Marshal questions, receiving answers through a divination ritual in which the chair is swung violently around by his acolytes.
Despite its setting in a disembodied studio environment, Spirit Writing formally and ideologically considers the construction of locality, or environmental space. Such space transcends a physical geography: rather, Hsu seeks to find a resting, omni-locational residence for a refugee god. The difficulties Marshal encounters in communicating his ideal resting space propose locating religious, cultural memory alongside diasporic refugee memory, cast in disjointed violence side by side into a digital ontology. This is a deterritorialization that equally re-territorializes an idiosyncratic, potential topography for the current contemporary moment of migration, absurdity, violence, and potentiated digital utopia.
Spirit Writing structurally differs from much of the other films in the Marshal Tie Jia series, in that it moves away from an emphasis on geological, physical locality, and instead proposes a transient virtuality for Mashal to evacuate to. In this way, Spirit Writing is a fitting coda to the series, marking a shift in Hsu’s practice, his works increasingly interested with digital ontologies and culture. By imbuing both “real” space and “digital” space with a divine appendix, it takes the series’ previous explorations of Taiwanese geopolitical tensions and moves toward the potential for open-ended migration, a messy visual paradox both reverent and absurd.
Embarking from myriad audio-visual narratives, Chia-Wei Hsu pursues imaginative interrogations of cultural contact and colonization in Asia, oftentimes amalgamating his primary narratives with non-human actors including technologies, animals, gods, environments, traditions, and material objects. Bringing these diverse subjects together results in a bumpy ontological bleed between them, forming the topography of a historical geography without a straightforward objective position. By reinterrogating what histories and relations coexist within a given locale, Hsu’s work manifests new imaginative potentialities for their revitalization, an uncertain, profound terrain throughout his films and installations.
While his work has consistently probed regulatory systems including religion, science, architecture, and military action, Hsu’s work has increasingly explored digital ontologies and the Internet of Things, in which previously luddite household objects have become connected to the internet. The digital, as a territorializing field produced by components largely manufactured in Asia, allows Hsu to attempt the detournement of western knowledge-bases to formulate new, imaginative archipelagos.