A Performance in the Church

This catalogue accompanies "A Performance in the Church," a solo exhibition by Hsu Chia-Wei, an artist featured in the "Machine Love: Video Games, AI, and Contemporary Art" exhibition, held at LIANG GALLERY in Taiwan.

"The exhibition centers around a series of works that Hsu Chia-Wei started in 2018 on a set of archacological discoveries situated around Hoping Island.

Hu's first interaction with the island began in 2008 with The Story of Hoping Island, which mainly focused on the history of the local shipyards during the Japanese Occupation. Yet, it wasn't until an archacological news report in 2014 that he learned of the efforts being taken to unearth remains from the Dutch-Spanish colonial era beneath the shipyard. It was these historical complexities and colonial implications on the island that inspired Hsu to pick up this topic once again.

The artist has collaborated with NTHU Archaeological Team to document the three-year 'Fort San Salvador and Todos Los Santos Church Archaeological Project' on Hoping Island. With this project as a point of departure, the artist has developed a map of movement of networks in Asian seas at that time. Just like how the internet brings today's world together, the rebuilding of Fort Noord-Holland (previously named as Fort San Salvador) in 1642, the building of the Dutch Governor's House in Malacca in 1641, and even the Dutch-Cambodia war in 1643 all belong to the same network of movement. With this understanding, Hsu has expanded his map of movement to include various archaeological projects such as the underwater site of Green Island, the remains at Nan-Shih-Keng, Taichung, and the Shinshe Stone Coffin in Hualien.

The recent turn to archaeometry introduces an interdisciplinary methodology across diverse fields— including physics, geology, and botany, to name just a few - to depict a temporal-spatial world we have never been able to see before.

Similar to the multidisciplinary nature of archacometry, the works in this exhibition capitalize on the connections between contemporary art, sound, archaeology, politics and other disciplines. They confront untraceable scenes with contemporary techniques to allow each performance to be created and materialized." - Excerpt from preface