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Digital FleshTishan Hsu
Silicone casts of body parts fuse to stainless steel canvases, bodily orifices penetrate digital landscapes, and abstracted images of flesh and machine blur in the uncannily visceral works of artist Tishan Hsu. From the 1980s to today, Hsu has explored the interconnected relationship between our bodies and technology through painting, sculpture, and video. “Technology was going to become part of us in a way that was very different than what people were imagining when they were thinking of sci-fi,” the artist says. “It was going to emerge organically into our lives. Technology was actually getting more human.” At a New York printmaking studio and his latest gallery show, this documentary short follows a pioneering artist as he updates the traditions of image-making for our screen-mediated culture while still insisting on the importance of the handmade. Hsu says, “Even though the digital image had all the properties I was looking for, I felt it was too controlled; and when I just looked at the world, all the sort of messiness of life is still there.”
Credits
Director & Producer: Andrea Yu-Chieh Chung. Executive Producer: Tina Kukielski. Series Producer: Ian Forster. Associate Curator: Jurrell Lewis. Editor: Thomas Niles. Cinematography: HaiTao Wu. Additional Camera: Yunbo Wu. Sound: Ana Fernández, Teresa-Esmeralda Sanchez. Colorist: Cody L Sandberg. Sound Mix: Collin Blendell. Assistant Editors: Stephanie Cen, Meher Hans. Music: Epidemic Sound.
Artwork Courtesy: Tishan Hsu, Lisson Gallery.
Archival Material: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; eFootage; Dario Lasagni; Stephen Faught; Kyle Knodell; LF Documentation; MAMCO Geneva; Jeff McLane; MIT List Visual Arts Center; New Museum; Oliver Ottenschlaeger; Pond5; Shutterstock; Annik Wetter; Michael Yu.
Special Thanks: Powerhouse Arts.
Art21 Staff: Makda Amdetsyon, Hannah DeGarmo, Lolita Fierro, Grace LeCates, Madeleine Mendell, Emma Nordin, Nick Ravich, Jessica Svenson, Noor Tamari, Emilia Copeland Titus, Nora Wimmer.
Extended Play is made possible with support from David Howe and Namiko Kato, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the Henry Nias Foundation.
Closed captionsAvailable in English, German, Romanian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian
Through the Art21 Translation Project, multilingual audiences from around the globe can contribute translations, making Art21 films more accessible worldwide.
Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.
Tishan Hsu was born in 1951 in Boston, Massachusetts, and lives and works in New York, New York. The artist earned a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T) in 1973 and a Master of Architecture from the same institution in 1975. Since the 1980s, Hsu has worked across painting, printmaking, sculpture, video, and more to reflect an evolving relationship between the human body and technology. From early paintings and sculptures that fused emerging digital aesthetics and traditional image-making techniques, to more recent works that draw on the new materials and technologies of the twenty-first century, the artist’s practice examines the transformative interplay between the organic and artificial.
“The role of the artist is to be able to express all of those things that society really often doesn’t have the time or bandwidth to do. There’s going to be a place where people are looking at certain questions, and wherever that is, that will be art.”
Tishan Hsu