Tishan Hsu is one of the artists, curator Cecilia Alemani has chosen for the 59th International Art Exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” in Venice, Italy.
Official description (by Madeline Weisburg): “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.”
Bio (source: Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York): Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston) spent his very early years in Zurich, then grew up in Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, and New York. He studied environmental design and architecture at MIT and received his BSAD in 1973 and M.Arch in 1975. While at MIT, Hsu studied film at the Carpenter Center, Harvard University. He moved to New York in 1979, where he currently resides. His first exhibition in New York was at Pat Hearn Gallery, and in 1987, he had a one-person show at Leo Castelli. Since the mid-1980s he has shown extensively in the United States, Europe, and Mexico. Hsu has served as a board member of White Columns, New York, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has been a professor of visual arts at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting professor at Pratt Institute and Harvard University. Tishan Hsu’s survey exhibition, Liquid Circuit, was on view at SculptureCenter, New York from September 2020 to January 2021, following its first iteration at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2021, his work was included in the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning; TECHNO at Museion, Bolzano, Italy; Zeros + Ones at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and The Poet-Engineers at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. In 2019, a one-person show, Delete, was held at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong. Hsu’s first solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, skin-screen-grass, opened on October 21, 2021. Tishan will be included in the 58th Carnegie International, organized by Sohrab Mohebbi, opening in September, 2022.
Tishan Hsu / Venice Art Biennale 2022 – The Milk of Dreams. Venice (Italy), April 22, 2022.
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