A Few Exercises in Morning

A Few Exercises in Mourning is an artist book collaboratively created by Hsu Che-Yu and Chen Wan-Yin, designed and edited by dmp editions. Within its pages, the visual components concentrate on three artworks that delve into themes of death, commemoration, and bodily hallucination: Blank Photograph, in which a former bomber reenacts the suicide of his brother; Grey Room, a VR experience that takes the viewer into childhood memories shaped by diplopia; and Zoo Hypothesis, a reconstruction of an animal memorial ceremony from World War II. Through various 3D scanning techniques, Hsu and Chen navigate a desaturated digital terrain of grayscale models, embarking on an exploration of “mourning techniques,” a passage through sensory catastrophe and neural residue.

The publication also features two essays: One is a lecture-performance script co-written with dramaturg Betty Yi-Chun Chen, first presented at Theater der Welt in Germany in 2023. The other is a conceptual essay “A Few Exercises in Mourning and Notes on Catastrophism,” co-authored by the artists as a reflection on the philosophical underpinnings of their recent works.