地吸引力和找水的女人
Gravity and a Woman Looking for Water

dual-channel video installation ｜ video in loop 12'46" ｜dimension variable

A Fall doesn’t mean a failure, and a failure doesn’t mean that you will forever fall.
But you fall.

This is a work made for the Non-EU artist collective —— vis-a-visa collective—— first exhibition: 

1,2,3, Fail!
As an old Chinese saying goes,“Failure is the mother of success.” and like Samuel Beckett said “Try again, Fail again, Fail better.”, I failed at making this sentence meaningful. Because this sentence is successfully meaningful.
The worst case is failure, or, is just failure.
You failed the trick in front of your crush even if you performed 100 times successfully before.
The cake you made for 2 hours and it tastes really bad.
Application being turned down, rejected, UNFORTUNATELY.
There would be times that your failure means other’s success.
But still, we get up and try. Failure keeps us aimful.
“I can’t be failing all the time… right?”

Failure, lack of success, the neglect or omission of expected or required action.
What is failure after all?
We failed good this time.
The exhibition showcases a collective of non-EU designers and artists sharing their thoughts on the word Failure, and what and how failure could mean?

(text written by teyen hsu)

Still Life

_1
60*58*8 cm | moving images in loop, personal belongings, plastic bags, digital frames

_2
40*35*4 cm | moving images in loop, textile, digital frame_3
18*28*4 cm | moving images in loop, mirror, tissue, tears, pearls, digital frame

Do not consider surface if it does not serve as the extension of the whole. The frame is not merely an ornament but an extension of the intrinsic logic, providing support to the essence to become what it is.
Still water runs deep.

This work is commissioned by Dordrechts Museum for the exhibition A Room With A View. Through observing the everyday life in the past through paintings and archeological archives from the Dordrechts Museum. A group of designers reimagine and correspond the findings under the contemporary gaze. Through a room acting as a stage where our stories are told, the juxtaposition of past and present, old and new, presents what a generation is thinking about today.

Inspired by the frame of The Glorification of Cornelis de Witt, painting by Jan de Baen, this series of works explored the frame of an image and its relation to the image and the space it inhabits from material frame to conceptual frame.

1_︎︎︎click for the video 2_︎︎︎click for the video 3_︎︎︎click for the video

Framed

single channel video in loop | 5'20" | dimension depends on the mobile phone

🎶 Girl put your earphones on 🎶

A voice message of a love letter to my beloved extracorporeal organ which sometimes makes my pinkies numb.

“This object, which present most of the images you see after the first decade of the 21st century, shares the same system as the panel paintings before the 12th Century. The frame and the painting are the same piece of wood. They carved the frame first, and painted in the hollow. The frame decided the limitation, the boundary, the possibility of an image, a story in color, the way of seeing, the power of creation.

It engraved an illusion of a world within itself. A world is stretching out within slimmer and slimmer edges, and we seems to have more space.” 

This work is commissioned by Dordrechts Museum for the exhibition A Room With A View. Through observing the everyday life in the past through paintings and archeological archives from the Dordrechts Museum. A group of designers reimagine and correspond the findings under the contemporary gaze. Through a room acting as a stage where our stories are told, the juxtaposition of past and present, old and new, presents what a generation is thinking about today.


Inspired by the frame of The Glorification of Cornelis de Witt, painting by Jan de Baen, this series of works explored the frame of an image and its relation to the image and the space it inhabits from material frame to conceptual frame.

Make things Sacred Again

This is the diploma project of Te-Yen Hsu in her study of master degree at Design Academy Eindhoven.
It contains the thesis —— Make Things Sacred Again: notes on the religious dimension of design, and a design project—— O.M.G.




Make Things Sacred Again: notes on the religious dimension of design
Master’s Thesis | Contextual Design |Design Academy Eindhoven
April, 2022, Eindhoven, NL | Format: Newspaper, 36 pages.

Good news and serious deep shit should always be thrown away easily. 🕳️

Abstract
In belief systems, how do people experience the sacredness through the materiality of objects? How do these sacred things come into being through the process of design? Does the original idea of design - as an act of creating - also reflect a religious attitude? What is a religious attitude and what does “sacred” really mean? These questions both fascinate and confuse me.

Carrying the questions with me, I started to explore the reification and materialization in religion, especially Taiwanese folk religion. The thesis thus became a personal reflection on modernity and my interest in humanity through understanding the history and material culture of religion. I found that the concept of “religion”, this forbidden topic in small talks, is very dif- ferent from how it is presented, categorized and observed in modern secu- lar society. By digging into material culture, I realized that we cannot know who we are, or become what we are, except by looking in a material mirror, which is the historical world created by those who lived before us and con- fronts us as material culture, and that continues to evolve through us. Through these findings, I have a clearer vision on how spiritual and material life have influenced and contributed to each other, thus intertwining to form a real world historically and continuously. Material culture can’t be created without design, therefore, I try to reflect what I found on the world of design.

Divided into three chapters, the thesis follows a brief narrative of religion-idol-creation, presenting the dialogue between sacred objects and design, religious attitude and design, and attempting to answer the simple yet profound mystery of “what is design and how it can be”?

O.M.G.

multimedia installation | dimension variable |
3 channels videos, ceramics, screens, synthetic hair

O.M.G. reconstructs the allegory of sacredness in everyday objects by exploring the interplay between religion and design through immaterial and material cultures.

Hsu’s research confronts religious attitudes and the concept of the sacred, adopting Mircea Eliade’s interpretation thereof. Eliade has emphasized that epiphany is inherent to being, permeating the mental, economic, spiritual and social lives of humans and their societies. Furthermore, we cannot be certain that any given phenomena – objects, movements, mental functions, games – have not become sacred in some era of human history. Hsu believes that this sacred manifestation stays with us, arguing that the religious nature of early civilizations spawned design. In other words, design and religion are connected in that they both posit that the visible and invisible world mutually permeate each other. Hsu approaches this interconnection from the position of a designer and maker, imagining how and why our ancestors started to design.

Following traces left by previous cultures in the form of mythologies, legends and artifacts, Hsu creates a bricolage of the ontological nostalgia of human-made objects. She uses the human body as a medium for the performance of a sympathetic magic between ancient and modern times. Taking the law of similarity – the effect resembles the cause – as a guiding principle, Hsu postulates a speculative narrative in which the body is the archetype of technology and modern objects. She builds a multimedia installation with sculptural objects and a video that mashes together popular culture both past and contemporary: from ancient mythologies to TikTok trends. Through her project, Hsu aims to design a new perspective on everyday objects, a reality formed by organs extending historically and transcendentally.

Female in Earth, 2022, 100*95*90 cm



No Shoes On the Rug , 90*200*2 cm. 

How to Read a Picture?

Multi-media Installation | dimension variable | 3-meter-long printed paper, speaker, single-channel video, a hidden photo

An interpretation on George Perec’s “infraordinary” by looking into how our so-usual-that-we-ignored brain process a picture.