Chia-Wei Hsu
Takasago
The word Takasago alludes to several things at once. Takasago is the name of a multi-billion dollar Japanese corporation, previously situated in Taiwan pre-World War II. It is also a famous Japanese Noh play, the oldest extant form of performance in Japan, combining dance, costuming/masks, acting, and operatic chants. Finally, Takasago was the Japanese name for Taiwan during the Japanese occupation from 1895 until the end of World War II.
The video work Takasago by Chia-Wei Hsu departs from these intertwined references by placing a performance of the Noh play Takasago inside of an industrial perfume plant owned by the Takasago corporation, using the play’s theme of a married couple to allegorize the relationship between Japan and Taiwan. The video flows back and forth across the screen, two masked actors portraying the protagonists singing to one another, each in their own frame. The mechanical background against the stripped, pale costuming of the actors creates a hollow, sonorous beauty, at once indicative of industrial relations and deep-set histories between the respective nation states. Through its allegorical use of the characters Takasago formulates a geopolitical relationship of affective embodiment, manifesting national identity in a performative body. This move grapples directly with the experience of historical geography as an individual in the contemporary present, possessing a multitude of influences.
That this experience is radically funneled through the ever-changing phenomena of tradition itself allows Takasago to assume an open profundity, using a single traditional form given a variety of meanings, and marking a divergent approach from the rest of his practice. This centralized approach allows Takasago to amalgamate into a cold, beautiful meditation on inter-Asian cultural contact and its relationship to time. It proposes a relationship divergent from the enmity towards Japan that some Taiwanese still feel to this day, loosening the boundaries between national and individual identity in favor of an affective, constellating relation.
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.