Stones and Elephants
2019 - Installation (Installation)
12:59 minutes
Chia-Wei Hsu
Stones and Elephants by Chia-Wei Hsu derives from the Malay literary classic The Hikayat Abdullah . The author Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, who once served as the secretary of Major General William Farquhar, chronicled his life in Malaysia and published his writings in 1849. Hsu’s video installation excerpts two chap- ters from this classic. The artist invited a Malay shaman to read these two stories as a voiceover and to pray for a peaceful filming trip. The chapter “Melaka Fort” depicts how the British destroyed the strong fortress to weaken Malacca and return control of the region to the Dutch East India Company, while the other describes the locals, William Farquhar, and his interest in ecology. The perspective offered by the drone creates a unique relationship between the human and the non-human. The artist can only use technology and the internet as a vessel for memories. As stated in the narration, “all these have passed, showing that everything is so fragile.” Algorithms ensure that every keyword search will show different results, presenting elements of truth among the uncertainty of this work. Through this, Hsu attempts to retrace historical scenes that have been lost to time.
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.
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