Tishan Hsu’s survey show at SculptureCenter is a grotesque reckoning of the corporeal relationship between the human flesh and technological present.

TEXT: Banyi Huang
IMAGES: Courtesy of the artist and SculptureCenter

“Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit” is the New York-based artist’s first institutional survey show in the US, which toured Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from January through April last year and now at SculptureCenter, New York. The exhibition comprises of some 30 seminal works across a range of media—sculptural installations, paintings, and works on paper—made between 1980 and 2005. In the artist’s own words: “The logic of the installation is not of an exhibition of paintings and sculptures, but rather of devices, screens, and robotic vehicles.” How do we make sense of this seemingly cryptic statement? Hsu’s sculptural assemblages morph between organic, hand-moulded shapes and industrially-produced, at times clinical forms, while his paintings occupy the ambiguous space between flat imagery and three-dimensional objects. In this nature, both defy conventional categorisation and cannot be contained by the rules of a singular medium. Meanwhile, Hsu’s exploration of the synthesis in form and function between the body and technological objects invites viewers to examine their own corporeal relationship with the physical-virtual environment.

For example, Autopsy (1988) takes up space with its undulating, Frankenstein-esque presence. Lined with flesh-coloured ceramic tiles, layers of rectangular shapes are rotated at different angles to imply a sense of movement. It is topped by four legs, each with metal wheels attached, as though a pink silicone cow had collapsed and melted upside down into the structure. In a sense, the work is reminiscent of how bodies conform to institutional discipline and mass production, so much that it congeals to whatever surface it comes into contact with, like bubble gum stuck to the underside of school desks.

Hsu’s sculptural surfaces are often stamped by a perfectly circular protrusion with an indentation in the middle—this distinct marking is mirrored in Interface Wall 2.0 – NY (2020), a large vinyl print that features the artist’s experimentations utilising digital image manipulation software such as Photoshop. Interspersed between densely packed formations of flesh-coloured nubs are human facial features warped beyond the point of recognition. Abstracted and exaggerated, eyes and mouths become mere orifices, their sexual and medical connotations made more apparent and threatening by virtue of the viewer’s corporeal proximity to these holes.

Technology renders obsolete the perceived boundary between the human body, two-dimensional planes, and three-dimensional space, allowing that which occupies the in-between areas to ooze out and reconfigure itself. Hsu’s contribution resides in considering mass media and industry’s effect on the physical body. In Virtual Flow (1990–2018), the body becomes indistinguishable from cold, sterile medical instruments. Lumps of liquifying silicone flesh, placed inside glass vitrines on a steel cart, are connected to a screen via electrical outlets. Here, they are literally plugged into devices. The fluidity with which the body is able to move through different states of being is also exemplified by Vertical Ooze (1987), an assemblage that makes use of pool-blue tiles to lay out a slippery landscape that could doubly function as a playground. In these works, one could recognise legacies of Minimalism in terms of the reduced form, industrial materials, and relation to the viewer’s body.

Conversely, Hsu’s relief paintings toy with the conceptual definition of imagery itself—in the case of digital imagery, it is made up of pixels—highlighting their inherent sculptural qualities by directly incorporating industrial materials such as metal handles, building up the surface, or making use of illusionism to delineate perspective. Cellular Automata 2 (1989) blows up the aforementioned pixels as square panels that make up a larger painting, depicting tubular protuberances, an eye, a tongue, and orifices so dark that they suck the viewer into a bottomless abyss. By making an analogy between digital pixels and biological cells, the artist gestures at how the body processes, digests, and filters images in the current burgeoning Information Age.

According to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), the very palpable feeling of horror or abjection is the experience that an individual encounters when the distinction between the Self and the Other breaks down completely. In psychoanalytic terms, it explains why bodily dismemberment, orifices found in the wrong places, and other horror tropes conjure up simultaneous sensations of repulsion and fascination. Hsu’s body of work in the exhibition intentionally removes safe boundaries between the body and technological tools whose functions reside in extending, alienating, and activating the body. Reflexes of abjection and unease are but a natural reaction.

The common motifs of body horror and technological accelerationism bring to mind Crash by J. G. Ballard. Published in 1973, the novel reveals a collective fetishism with car-crashes, describing in pornographic detail the way our soft bodies converge with the mass-produced hardware, dashboard, and cockpit of the automobile. The vertigo that accompanies an imagined speed and futurism is transformed into an intense desire to merge with the sleek, hard surfaces of automation and machinery. Hsu’s thinking, however, is not preoccupied with effects of spectacle, coolness, and glamour that so often turns attention away from the body’s innate inquietude and mortality. Instead, it dwells on the way that the body oozes into the crevices of devices, screens, and robotic vehicles, and vice versa, revealing a profound contradiction—the undeliverable promises of technology in transcending the fleshly, grotesque body.

Tishan Hsu: Liquid Circuit
24 September 2020 — 25 January 2021
SculptureCenter, New York