The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 80 Black and White – Malayan Tapir (still) 2018 Four-channel video: 16:9, colour, sound, 6:55 minutes / Courtesy: The artist Samurai and Deer (still) 2019 Two-channel video: 16:9, colour, sound, 8:50 minutes / Courtesy: The artist Chia-Wei Hsu uses video and installation to present his historical research, creating highly engaging, frequently humorous arrangements of contemporary consumer technology — from smartphone footage and drone photography to live Google searches. Hsu is inspired by the disruption of conventional narrative techniques by artists working between art and cinema, including France’s Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Pierre Huyghe, as well as celebrated Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He also draws on the complex processes of identification experienced by his grandmother; born and raised as a Japanese subject, she was forced to adopt Chinese nationality following World War Two, before adjusting again to the Taiwanese identity that emerged during the liberalisation of the 1990s. Taiwan’s layered history of colonialism, and a particular focus on the processes involved in the formation of national and cultural identity, serve as the backdrop to Hsu’s studies of the political genealogies of the region. Hsu’s prolific output ranges from attentive documentation of performers resident in Phnom Penh’s now demolished White Building, to the oral history of a troop of Chinese nationalist soldiers who became stranded in a Thai village for decades and would eventually lead the heroin trade that fuelled Thai military campaigns against local communists. Since 2018, the artist has taken animals as a device for investigating the role played by various powers in shaping the political landscape of Asia, such as a comedic lecture-performance about China’s ‘panda diplomacy’, and a sensitive study of a rare species of bat living in an abandoned Japanese fuel plant in Taiwan. Samurai and Deer 2019 narrates the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) 1633–34 attempt to corner the market for deerskin in Edo-period Japan by invading Cambodia, having exhausted its Taiwanese sources through overhunting. Stones and Elephants 2019 describes episodes from British East India Company Commandant William Farquhar’s tenure in Malacca, including his hiring of a local shaman to round up elephants, and the destruction of a fortress built by the Portuguese and held by the Dutch to prevent it from falling into the hands of the advancing French. Black and White – Malayan Tapir 2018 is an account of the role of the Malayan tapir in the race between Farquhar and his Penang-based supervisor (and political rival) Stamford Raffles, to gather zoological and botanical data from the respective colonial posts. Hsu conveys these three narratives through clever choreographies of digital imagery, eschewing, or at least complicating, documentarian conventions. The VOC’s repulsion, through a series of naval battles on the Mekong, is recounted orally by deer keepers from Phnom Penh, while four overlapping videos drift across the field of view in an evocation of the interconnected global market already in formation in seventeenth- century South-East Asia. The colonial intrigues surrounding scientific accounts of the Malayan tapir are relayed in an upbeat zookeeper’s talk, presented alongside footage of contemporary Singaporean natural history institutions in the vertical format of smartphone video. Hsu invited a present-day shaman to narrate Stones and Elephants and received his blessing for a peaceful video production. The completed work includes dramatic drone footage, and automated Google searches for key terms in real time, such that the results will subtly change as the algorithm adjusts over the course of the exhibition. While such techniques imbue these videos with an engaging, contemporary sensibility, they also place the artist’s accounts of the past firmly in the present. Hsu’s approachable, information- packed works are clearly inflected by current urgencies, as great powers once again vie for sovereignty and spheres of influence within the region. Like all good history lessons, they also have something to say to the contingencies of the moment, and to the motives and dynamics underpinning them. Reuben Keehan Chia-Wei Hsu Born 1983, Taichung, Taiwan Lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan