Tishan Hsu has described technology’s integration with the body as his central artistic preoccupation. As he has said, “I consider myself a cyborg. Google is my memory.” In the early 1980s, Hsu had been working as a “word processor” at a Wall Street law firm, encountering computers before they were widely accessible. His early bulging paintings and tiled sculptures evoke the hours he spent immersed in such a technological orbit: saturated with static, bits of digital data, scratchy surfaces, floating orifices, and fragmented body parts, these works dissolve the threshold between screen and flesh. Hsu’s most recent works, like Watching 3 and Breath 7 (both 2022), use innovative fabrication techniques and materials – particularly silicone and alkyd, a durable synthetic resin – to call to mind bodily orifices, organic matter, or biotic growths. Watching 2 (2021)’s psychedelic raster pattern is embellished with a nipple, a belly button, the display screen of a thermometer gun, and imagery related to emotional surveillance technologies. Phone-Breath-Bed and Breath 3 (both 2021) play on the technologies that simultaneously disembody and connect human beings, with particular attention to medical apparatuses. At the root of these works is the question of technology’s effects – whether distorting, surveilling, or life-giving – on human beings.
Madeline Weisburg
